Episode 006: Selective sharpening
Every digital image needs sharpening. But sharpening increases the noise in the image. In this episode I show a way to sharpen only the areas that need to be sharpened - the edges between different colours or levels of brightness. All the other parts of the image are left alone and so the noise stays down.
Sharpening should always be the very last thing you do with your image.
Chris Marquard explained sharpening in Photoshop Corner No. 4 in his Tips from the Top Floor podcast.
I got the described method from the Gimp tutorial page.
Wikipedia describes the underlying process in this article about the unsharp mask. The links at the bottom of the page are very informative.
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Tags: selective sharpening, sharpening
August 17th, 2007 at 2:57 am
Please send me the image for this episode. I want to try it!
I am learning a lot, but I know I will learn even more when I review each episode later. My learning curve is SO high now. Experience tells me that the more I already know, the more I can absorb.
Thanks for your wonderful work.
August 19th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Hey, just stumbled across your podcast and I just love it. I’ve been on the Linux platform for some months now and haven’t been missing anything accept Photoshop. You have wiped out the last reason for me to keep a Windows partition on my harddrive! Thanks!
Keep up the great work!
/Sebastian
August 21st, 2007 at 5:43 am
I’ve been using portable Gimp from portableapps.org and think it would be useful if you could explain using UFRaw for pulling in RAW images. I use it currently, but understanding the dialogs is somewhat confusing.
August 21st, 2007 at 8:43 am
@rmh1985: I put the images online at http://www.23hq.com/rstein/album/2336004
@Sebastian: Power to the Penguin!
@Matt: UFRaw is on my list - will be covered in a show soon.
December 5th, 2007 at 7:53 am
[...] Episode 006: Selective sharpening [...]