Roundup of Sharp Photography
By Brian Auer • March 19th, 2007In two previous posts, I wrote “6 Tips for Controlling Sharpness” and “Photo Sharpening Techniques” which described how to ensure sharp photos straight out of the camera and how to sharpen photos using Photoshop, respectively. As a finishing touch for my two part mini-series, I’ve gathered up a few other resources when it comes to sharp photos.
If you like video tutorials, here are a few from YouTube:
- Photoshop Tutorial – Basic Sharpening shows how each of the sharpening filters affect the image. It also contains a pretty good section on just the Unsharp Mask and how to use it.
- Advanced Sharpening gives a good tip on how to split the Unsharp Mask layer into light and dark pixels using blends. This is a great idea for those times when the highlights and halos are just a bit too extreme. I’ll definitely be using this one from now on.
- Lab Sharpening in Photoshop is a good visual representation of the method I described in my previous post, where you sharpen the luminosity channel in LAB mode rather than the RGB image. The results are a little hard to see on the video, but the technique is there.
If you like to read:
- Cambridge In Colour has an article that will help you understand sharpness if you’re still a little fuzzy about what it is and what it’s made of.
- Photoshop Support has an in-depth screenshot-packed tutorial for how to use the High Pass filter and the Unsharp Mask filter for sharpening photos.
- DIY Photography shows us how to make a tripod out of a soda bottle for those times when you don’t want to pack a full sized tripod.
- Instructables shows us how to make a remote shutter release for a Pentax. If you don’t have a Pentax, I’m sure there’s a way to do it for your camera — you’ll just have to figure it out.
- Photodoto has a tip for sharpening photos when you’re in a hurry.
- About: Photography has some good leads if you can’t seem to avoid blurry images.
If all else fails, embrace the blur and call it art.
Photo of the Day…
Photo by Brian Auer
02/24/07 New Jersey
Art
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Sigma 10-20mm F/4-5.6 EX DC HSM
20mm equiv * f/13 * 4.0s * ISO100
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
Visit the author's homepage | View all Epic Edits posts by Brian Auer
