The following book excerpt has been republished from Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers by Martin Evening with the permission of Focal Press. The complete book is available for purchase by photo.net users for 20% off the cover price for a limited time (use promo code “PHOTONET”).
Martin Evening’s Adobe Photoshop for Photographers titles have become classic reference sources for photographers at all skill levels. Whether you are an accomplished user or just starting out, the Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers book contains a wealth of practical advice, hints and tips to help you achieve professional-looking results.
Martin Evening’s Adobe Photoshop for Photographers titles have become classic reference sources for photographers at all skill levels. Whether you are an accomplished user or just starting out, the Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers book contains a wealth of practical advice, hints and tips to help you achieve professional-looking results.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers
When I first started using Photoshop, it was a much simpler program to get to grips with
compared to what we see today. Adobe Photoshop CS4 has evolved to provide
photographers with all the tools they need, and my aim is to provide you with a working photographer’s perspective of what Photoshop CS4 can do and how you can make the
most effective use of the program.
One of the biggest problems writing a book about Photoshop is that while new features are added, Adobe rarely remove anything from the program. Hence, Photoshop has got bigger and more detailed over the last 12 years I have been writing this series of books. When it has come to updating each edition, this has left the question, should I make the book bigger, or should I take things out? For this particular edition I decided to have a complete rethink about the way the book’s subject matter was tackled. This edition of the book is the same size as
the previous versions, but it is now completely focused on all the essential information you need to know about Photoshop, Camera Raw and Bridge, plus all that’s new in Photoshop CS4 for photographers. Consequently, if you have bought a previous edition of this book, you’ll find a lot of the content here is new and goes into greater detail than before on subjects such as Camera Raw editing and high dynamic range imaging.
As a result of this editing process, a lot of the older favorite techniques had to be removed. To make up for this I decided to get together with Jeff Schewe to co-write a new Photoshop for Photographers book, which we are calling The Ultimate Workshop. This is a book in which Jeff and I hammer out a series of techniques designed for professional Photoshop users which, as the title suggests, will be like attending the ultimate training workshop on Photoshop techniques.
Section 3: Camera RAW Sharpening
Amount Slider
1. The Amount slider is like a volume control. As you increase the Amount the
overall sharpening is increased. A default setting of 25% is applied to all raw or
raw DNG images, but if you open a TIFF, or JPEG image, Camera Raw assumes
the image has already been pre-sharpened and applies a 0% Amount setting. So if
you are editing the image that came on the DVD you will need to set this to 25% to
simulate the default setting shown here.
2. As you increase the Amount setting to 100% you will notice how the image gets
sharper. 100% is plenty strong enough but you can take the Amount even higher.
Camera Raw allows this extra headroom because it can sometimes be necessary
when you start dampening the sharpening effect with the Detail and Masking
sliders.
Radius Slider
1. The Radius slider is identical to the one found in the Unsharp Mask filter. The
Radius determines the width of the halos generated around the edges in the photo.
A small radius setting can be used to pick out fine detail in a picture, but will have
a minimal effect on the soft, wider edges in a picture.
2. A high radius setting will over-emphasize the fine edges, but do more to enhance
the soft edges such as the facial features in a portrait. I have shown here the two
extremes that can be used, but for most sharpening adjustments you will want to
stick close to a 1.0 Radius and make small adjustments around this setting.
Suppression Controls
The Amount and Radius sliders are used to create the sharpening effect, while the next two sliders are what I refer to as the ‘suppression’ controls, and these are used to constrain the sharpening and target the sharpening effect where it is most needed.
Detail Slider
The Detail slider suppresses the halo effects in a picture. It allows you to increase the Amount sharpening but without generating noticeable halo edges in the picture. There has
always been a certain amount of halo suppression built into the Camera Raw Sharpening, but you can now use the Detail slider to fine-tune the Amount and Radius effects by
setting Detail to a low value. The following screen shots were again captured with the O A key held down as I dragged the Detail slider. Note that these previews show an isolated preview of the sharpening effect (see ‘Interpreting the grayscale previews’ on page 240 in the book).
1. In this first example the Detail slider is at its default setting of 25, and captured
here with the O A key held down. This displays an isolated grayscale preview
of the sharpening effect. At this setting the Detail slider is gently suppressing
the halo effects to produce a strong image sharpening effect but without overemphasizing
the fine detail or noisy areas of the picture.
2. If you take the Detail slider all the way to 100, the capture sharpening will be
almost identical to a standard unsharp mask filter effect applied in Photoshop at a
zero Threshold setting.
3. If on the other hand, you take the Detail slider down to zero you can see how the
picture looks with maximum halo suppression. What we learn from this is how to
set the Detail slider between these two extremes. For portraits and other subjects
that have soft edges, I would recommend a lowish Detail setting of around 20-30
so that you prevent the flat tone areas from becoming too noisy, and for images
that have lots of fine detail I would mostly suggest using a higher value of 30-50,
because you don’t want to suppress the halo edges quite so much. With these
types of photos you will probably want to add more emphasis to the fine edges.
Masking Slider Example
1. When the masking slider is at the default zero setting, no masking is applied to
the sharpening effect. If you hold down the O A key as you drag the Masking
slider, you can see a grayscale preview of the mask that is being generated. At the
50% setting shown here, the mask is just starting to protect the areas of flat tone
from being sharpened.
2. In this next screen shot you can see a preview where the masking slider is taken
to the maximum 100% setting. In this example the masking is a lot stronger and
protects all the flat tone areas leaving only the strongest edges unmasked. The
sharpening effect is now only applied to the white areas.
Some Real World Sharpening Examples
Now that I have given you a run down on what the individual sharpening sliders do, let’s look at how you would use them in practice to sharpen an image.
Sharpening a Portrait
Figure 1 shows a 1:1 close-up view of a male portrait where I used the following settings: Amount:35, Radius: 1.2, Detail: 20, Masking 70. This combination of Sharpening slider settings is most appropriate for use with male or female portraits, or any photo where you wish to sharpen the important areas of detail such as the eyes and lips, but protect the smooth areas (like the skin) from being sharpened.
Sharpening a Landscape
Figure 2 shows the settings that would be used to sharpen a landscape image. The settings used here were: Amount:40, Radius: 0.8, Detail: 50, Masking 0. This combination of Sharpening slider settings is most appropriate for subjects such as the seascape scene shown in this photograph. You could include quite a wide range of subject types in this category and basically you would use this particular combination of slider settings whenever you needed to sharpen photographs that contained a lot of narrow edge detail.
Sharpening a Fine-detailed Subject
Figure 3 shows an example of a photograph that contains a lot of fine-edge detail, where the Sharpening sliders in the Detail panel needed be taken to extremes. In order to sharpen the fine edges in this picture I had to take the Radius down to a setting of 0.5 or 0.6. I also wanted to emphasize the detail and therefore ended up setting the Detail slider to +80. This is a lot higher than one would want to use normally, but I have included this here to show an example of a photograph that required a unique treatment. As with the previous example, I didn’t need to add any masking because there were no areas in the photograph where I needed to hide the sharpening.
More
There is a website for the book where you can find more information and download more PDF sample pages from the book.
Martin Evening’s Adobe Photoshop for Photographers titles have become classic reference sources for photographers at all skill levels. Whether you are an accomplished user or just starting out, the Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers book contains a wealth of practical advice, hints and tips to help you achieve professional-looking results. Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers begins with an overview of the Photoshop interface and the fundamentals of how to use Photoshop, followed by how to configure and optimize your computer’s performance to run the program and then it dives straight into the essentials of Camera Raw image editing. The Sharpening chapter shows how to use the Camera Raw controls to obtain optimum capture sharpening and noise reduction and the Essentials chapter outlines how to work with all the basic image adjustment tools that are in the program, some of which have been there since the very beginning. Practical workshops show you how to master the essential techniques, such as color correction, retouching techniques, toning a black and white image, creating composite images and so on. Each technique is described in step-by-step detail, showing exactly which command to use, whether you are working with a Mac or PC computer.
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