Sometimes Cloudy in Virginia

I’m late to the game on this trick, but I just learned it today so I think it’s pretty cool.  I’ve been sharpening images with Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask for quite a while.  It has worked pretty well for me, though it isn’t terribly easy to selectively apply or adjust after the fact.  Enter the Hgh Pass Filter sharpening method… I first heard it this morning, catching up on an old podcast from TWIP.  I did a little searching to find out more and found two nice tutorials on the method at Layers Magazine and PhotoshopSupport.com.  The basics are:

1. Create a duplicate layer from your image
2. Apply the High Pass Filter (radius somewhere between 1-3 pixels seems to work well)
3. Change blending mode to Overlay (optionally Soft Light or Hard Light)
4. Adjust opacity of the layer to your sharpening needs.

Read the linked articles for more information and sample images.  The advantage is a layer whose opacity you can adjust to increase/decrease the effect, as well as being able to easily mask the layer to selectively apply the filter.  Very cool.

I got this from a guest tutorial by Mark Riley over at PhotoWalkthrough.com.  I saw this just days after looking through my collection of Photoshop books looking for this very thing.  Anyway, the very easy steps to a simple vignette:

1. Create a new layer
2. Change the blending mode to ‘Soft Light’
3. Fill the layer with all black
   (Quick Photoshop keystrokes: ‘d’ for default color palette, ‘alt-del’ to fill with foreground color)
4. Select the eraser tool with a large, soft, circular brush
5. Erase the center of the black layer, leaving just a small region around the edges for the vignette
6. Reduce the opacity of the layer to tune the amount of vignetting applied

Go watch Mark in action in the tutorial video to see it done: PW86 – Tutorial 16 Chapter 2 – Urban Ugliness (mp4 video).  Very handy.  Works well in the Gimp, too.