Calvin’s Hub

Here’s a simple but neat trick that I learned today courtesy of my photographer friend, Bryan. I asked him how I can sharpen photos taken with my point-and-shoot camera to resemble those taken with DSLR.

I’ve been noticing that some of my photos are a little bit blurred or smudged and details tend to get lost. Tweaking contrast in Photoshop just made the lines darker but I want something that would make the details pop out.

If you know what I mean and you’re wondering the same yourself, try this simple trick in Photoshop.

1. Open your photo in Photoshop. I’m going to use this photo of furs we took in Datong, China using my point-and-shoot Panasonic ZS1.

Nothing’s really wrong with it. I just want to show you the difference when details pop out.

2. Create a duplicate of it on a different layer. Layer > Duplicate Layer > Ok.

3. On the new layer, go to Filter > Other > High Pass and enter the value of 4.0.

4. On the same layer, click the Layer Drop-down menu and select Overlay, or any choice from that section (Soft, Hard, Vivid, Linear and Pin Light). Just play around until you get the desired result.

5. And watch the result. Examine the details closely and compare it to the original image. They really popped out right?

Now I’m not saying that you do this on all of your images. Just those that seem to be lacking detail. Or looks too soft.

Here are some more samples of photos treated with this technique. Just click the image and click Next and Previous to quickly see the difference.

It works great on close-up shots:

Or when you want to make the subject stand out from the background:

Hmm, can’t really see much difference that way. Anyway, just go try it out yourself and show/hide the duplicate layer to see the difference.

Thanks for this tip Bry!

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• How to fix grainy photos in Photoshop
• How to soften up your portrait photos
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Filed under: Tips n' Trix