Easy photo sharpening

Being the only designer geek in a family full of programmers I get called on for anything IT that involves images or Photoshop. Recently I have been asked several times how to sharpen a photo well and so that the end result isn’t blocky nor hazy.

To demonstrate I’ll show you an original image (Photography in Margaret River Lake Cave in Australia – no light and no tripod!) After the original image I will talk you through three simple steps to a nice sharp image.

mriver-blur

Step one:
Open you image in Photoshop and go to image – mode – lab colour. This doesn’t look like it’s done anything but go with me on this!

Step two:
Go to the window option and select layers. On the layers panel select the lightness channel to only edit that one channel.

Step three:
Go to the filter menu and select Sharpen – Unsharp Mask (this gives you more control than just Sharpen – Sharpen) Finally, adjust the sliders until you get the image just how you want it. Convert you rimage back to RGB in the image – mode options and there you have it, a nicely sharpened image.

mriver-sharp