Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [127]
Advanced Smart Sharpen mode
In Advanced mode you get to see two additional tabbed sections marked Shadow and Highlight. The controls in these sections act like dampeners on the main smart sharpening effect. The Fade Amount slider selectively reduces the amount of sharpening in either the shadow or highlight areas. This is the main control to play with as it will have the most initial impact in reducing the amount of artifacting that may occur in the shadow or highlight areas. Below that is the Tonal Width slider and this operates in the same way as the one you find in the Shadows/Highlights image adjustment: you can use this to determine the tonal range width that the fade is applied to. These two main sliders allow you to subtly control the smart sharpening effect. The Radius also works in a similar way to the Radius slider found in the Shadows/ Highlights adjustment and is used to control the area width of the smart sharpening.
Saving the Smart Sharpen settings
You can save Smart Sharpen settings as you work by clicking on the save settings icon circled below in Figure 4.14 and call these up via the Settings menu in the Smart Sharpen filter dialog.
Figure 4.14 In this photograph I set the Smart Sharpen filter to Advanced mode and applied an Amount of 100% at a Radius of 1.0 using the Lens Blur mode with the More Accurate box checked. Once I had selected suitable settings for the main Smart Sharpen, I clicked on the Shadow and Highlight tabs and used the sliders in these sections to decide how to limit the main sharpening effect. A high Fade Amount setting will fade the sharpening more, while the Tonal Width determines the range of tones that are to be faded. Lastly, there is the Radius slider, where you can enter a Radius value to determine the scale size for the corrections.
Removing Motion Blur
The Motion Blur mode can be used to correct for mild camera shake or small amounts of subject movement in a photograph (see Figure 4.15). If you select the Remove Motion Blur mode, the trick here is to get the angle in the dialog to match the angle of the Motion Blur in the picture and adjust the Radius and Amount settings to optimize the Motion Blur correction. To achieve optimum results with any of these sharpening modes, check the ‘More Accurate’ option at the bottom This will increase the time it takes the filter to process the image, but I suggest you leave it checked if you want to get the very best results.
Figure 4.15 The Motion Blur method of Smart sharpened smart sharpening is reasonably good at improving sharpness where there is just a slight amount of camera shake or subject movement. In this example I initially set the Amount, Radius and Angle to achieve the most effective sharpening and in Advanced mode I went to the Highlight tab to adjust the Fade Amount and Tonal Width settings so as to dampen the sharpening effect in the highlights. This helped achieve a slightly smoother- looking result.
Creating a depth of field brush
On page 279 I showed how you could use the Smart Sharpen filter to remove the blurriness from parts of an image and selectively apply the filter effect through a layer mask. There is also another way you can reduce blur in a photograph and this technique is closely based on a technique first described by Bruce Fraser, in his book the Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw and Lightroom (2nd Edition). The only thing I have done here is to change some of the suggested settings, in order to produce a narrower edge sharpening brush. Basically, you can adapt these settings to produce a sharpness layer that is suitable for different types of focus correction.
No to Smart Filter layers
On page 278 I mentioned how it was advantageous to use Smart Filter layers when applying a localized filter effect, mainly because with a Smart Object layer you can go back and revise the filter settings later.