Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [128]
Of course, you can't really make out-of-focus elements in a picture come back into focus, but you can make the blurred image detail appear to look sharper by adding a blended mixture of sharp and soft halos which create the illusion of apparent sharpness. The following technique requires you to first create a duplicate of the Background layer and adjust the Layer Style options so that the filter effects you are about to apply are limited to the midtone areas only and the extreme shadows and highlights are protected.
Adjusting the Depth of field settings
The Unsharp Mask and High Pass filter settings used here were designed to add sharpness to areas that contained a lot of narrow edge detail (such as the edges in a landscape). You will want to vary these settings when treating other types of photographs where you perhaps have wider edges that need sharpening. For example, Bruce's original formula suggests using an Unsharp Mask filter Radius of 4 pixels combined with a 40 pixel Radius in the High Pass filter.
You will notice that the first step involves changing the blend mode of the duplicate background layer to Overlay. This will initially make the image appear more contrasty, but you will find that once you have applied the Unsharp Mask followed by the High Pass filter, it is only the image edges that are enhanced by the use of this technique. In Step 3 you will notice I apply the Unsharp Mask filter at a maximum strength of 500%, with a Radius of 1.0 pixel and the Threshold set to zero. The purpose of this step is to aggressively build narrow halos around all the edge detail areas, and in particular the soft edges, while the High Pass filter step is designed to add wider, over lapping, soft-edged halos that increase the midtone contrast. When these two filters are combined you end up with a layer that improves the apparent sharpness in the areas that were out-of-focus, but the downside is that the previously sharp areas will now be degraded. By adding a layer mask filled with black, you can use the brush tool to paint with white to selectively apply the adjustment to those areas where the sharpening effect is needed most.
1.
This shows the before version of a photograph in which the foreground was perfectly sharp, but there was a fall-off in focus towards the middle distance. The first step was to make a duplicate of the Background layer.
2.
I then double-clicked the Background layer to open the Layer Style options and adjusted the settings as follows. The blend mode was set to ‘Overlay’ and the layer Opacity reduced to 50%. The layer ‘Blend If’ sliders were adjusted as shown here to provide more protection for the extreme shadows and highlights.
3.
I clicked OK to the Layer Style changes and applied an Unsharp Mask filter to the Background copy layer, using an amount of 500% and a Radius of 1.0 pixel. This was followed by a High Pass filter (Filter Other High Pass) using a Radius of 20 pixels.
4.
Finally, A clicked the Add Layer Mask button in the Layers panel (circled). This added a layer mask filled with black, which hid the layer contents. I was then able to select a normal brush and paint on the layer mask with white to reveal the depth of field sharpening layer and, in doing so, add more apparent sharpness to the middle distance.
Removing noise in Photoshop
Overall, Photoshop now provides you with several strategies for reducing noise. For example, with previous versions of Camera Raw all we had were the Luminance and Color sliders, but if you now process your images via Camera Raw 6.0 you can use the new noise reduction sliders to produce better results. When you