High Pass or Unsharp Mask Technique for Sharpening?


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windforce

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Oct 14, 2007
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hi all

Was trying out 2 different techniques of sharpening in this PS CS3 Essential skills book.

I tried it on 2 different photos. Unsharp mask is more tedious but supposedly to work better than High pass sharpening.

High Pass


By windforce86

Unsharp


By windforce86

High Pass


By windforce86

UNsharp


By windforce86

All images at 100% crop

Thanks for reading
 

hi, not sure if highpass really sharpens images.
but it can make ur pictures more contrasty, which may make them look sharper.

to do it, create a copy of the layer and add high pass to it, around 5.0 radius? (u can play around with it)
then under blending options, try selecting between "overlay" "soft-light" "hard-light"

hope this is slightly helpful at least :]
personally i like the effect it gives.

cheers
 

hi, not sure if highpass really sharpens images.
but it can make ur pictures more contrasty, which may make them look sharper.

to do it, create a copy of the layer and add high pass to it, around 5.0 radius? (u can play around with it)
then under blending options, try selecting between "overlay" "soft-light" "hard-light"

hope this is slightly helpful at least :]
personally i like the effect it gives.

cheers

haha yea thats exactly wad i did which was mentioned in the book 1-5.0 pixel and soft light or overlay.

but although i did so much work for unsharp which includes threshold gau blur ++++ the effect still ok onli but the book shows that unsharp works better. somehow
 

Used to favour unsharp masks but it makes the photo a tad noisy. Ive switched to high pass filter ever since. :)
 

its hard 2 tell from ur photos as it seems like theres some handshake or something making it look abit blur...

i use high pass filter for my own preference... think it boils down to preference of how u like to work ur photos...
 

its hard 2 tell from ur photos as it seems like theres some handshake or something making it look abit blur...

i use high pass filter for my own preference... think it boils down to preference of how u like to work ur photos...

Yup, I agree. It's personal preference. There is no method that is objectively better, just boils down to what you prefer. Personally, I prefer unsharp mask as I find that the high pass tends to increase contrast too much, and sometimes I just want the photo sharpened without adding contrast.

However, to clarify shmuckerz comment, all methods of sharpening the photo do not really sharpen the photo. They merely increase the edge contrast of the photo, producing the perception of a sharper image. However, the image is not strictly sharpened. It just appears that way.
 

Thanks for all the comments. Yea the photos a bit handshake due to the low light and high aperture.

I actually also prefer high pass rather than unsharp for this photo at least. Maybe it works for different situations. Will try more.

thanks again.
 

Hi windforce,
may i know what lens u using for both those pics? look soft to me, quite bit of noise. any IS?
btw, the first pic is 1 or 2 dragonflies?
 

how to do the unsharp mask? can anyone brieftly tell me the steps? i wanna try too...
 

Hi windforce,
may i know what lens u using for both those pics? look soft to me, quite bit of noise. any IS?
btw, the first pic is 1 or 2 dragonflies?

actually i dont theres any diff whether wad lens i use becoz i just need a comparison between the 2 sharpening methods. Of course you could fix the lens or fine tune it but that isn't my point here :)

anw i'm using 80-200 f2.8 for dragon flies and a 60m micro for the lizard. both no VR since i'm using nikon.
 

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