How To Sharpen A Picture Without Noise Appearance
Let's talk about simple and effective way of sharpness increase in
Photoshop for the series of images without quality drawbacks and noise
appearance. If you shoot in reportage genre or process large quantity
of photos, then most definitely you will appreciate this method.
Today we'll show you 2 interesting Photoshop tools - Layer Style and Photoshop Actions.
Photoshop Action is a consequence of certain actions in Photoshop, which can be
applied on big amount of pictures. You can learn more about Actions and
the working process here.
Layer Style is a powerful tool
for work with Layers. In order to talk about its full potential in
details we may need a separate article, but now we'll concentrate on
Blending Options paragraph.
So, we have a task of sharpness
increase without noise appearance. In order to solve it, we need to
understand which noise is mostly visible and shown in the first place.
Try to increase sharpness on the photo, then check those areas, where
noise is noticeable the most. It will happen in the dark areas, so we
shall work with those from the start.
How do we increase sharpness without noise appearance
First, we need to increase sharpness on the whole image, but trying not
to touch the black areas of the shot. For that reason we shall use
Layer Style instrument.
In order to enter the Layer Style, we need to click twice on the Layer, which we have chosen to work on. As you see, in the Layer Style there are
lots of settings, but let's check the Blend If function in the
Blending Options.
Blend If option allows to make overlay settings according to the pixel
brightness. In other words, we may take, for example, dark areas from
one Layer, and light areas from another.
Let's start recording our Action
1. Create a new Action (called Sharpness, for example) and press Record button - now we have started our recording.
2. Open the photo you need and duplicate the layer.
3. Use Filter -> Smart Sharpen to the background copy.
4. Click twice on the background layer icon to open Layer Style. We
need to change Blend If parameter as shown on the picture. So we adjust
the parameters so as all dark areas were used from the layer below,
where we haven't used Smart Sharpen.
5. Now Layer -> Flatten Image (or right click on the layer -> Flatten Image)
6.
Then Save your file and Close it. You should include these points in
your Action if you want to apply it on a group of photos.
7. Press Stop button to finish the Action.
If you've done everything correctly the Action should look like this.
Now
using the Batch function we can apply this Action to any number of
images. Try it and you'll see that the sharpness is increased but not
the noise. In order to compare the effect we apply only Smart Sharpen
filter on the left photo.
Sharpness level is equal on both of pictures but the picture processed with Layer Style has lower noise amount.
Blend If has a lot of variants to adjust, so in some cases you may work
separately with Red, Green or Blue channels. Also it's possible to
remove noise in dark areas and leave it in light areas, just like we've
done it in our example, because concerning the reportage genre, the
viewer perceives the noise in the dark area as a defect, but the slight
noise on the light area can be perceived as an additional texture or
sharpness.
We hope this article will help you to improve your photography and post processing skills!
Read more:
Photographer Interview: Nehaseth28
10 Tips How To Shoot Architecture
Photographer Interview: skittle11
Now You Can Forget About Flame Effects In Photoshop
Tips You Are Looking For Studio Lighting Techniques
|
