Photo Edit Technique - Selective Sharpening

I was editing this photo, and thought to make it in to a quick guide to using selective sharpening.

This is the original photo with a crop already applied of a Blue Grosbeak taken at Bombay Hook NWR in Delaware. The original uncropped image was basically a bulls-eye composition, so I cropped it to place the bird off center and add room for the bird to be looking in to.



The first thing I did to edit it was adjust the levels a little moving both the white and black points towards the middle...



Next I made a copy of the image with the levels adjusted, and made a new layer out of that. I applied some Unsharp Mask (rough settings of 100, 1.5, 0) and then some Smart Sharpening. The problem with doing this across the entire image is that the background gets very grainy. It's already blurred and out of focus, so trying to sharpen it doesn't help at all.

So, the trick is to then add a layer mask to the layer that has the sharpening on it. Add the mask, fill it with black (click on the mask part of the layer, Shift-F5, select black,, hit enter.) This hides the entire layer. Then zoom in on the bird, and select the paint brush and the white color. Then you paint white in to the mask to reveal that part of the layer. All I wanted sharpened was the bird and the branch he was on. So, without any other layers visible but the sharpened one it would look like this with the mask applied:


(the mask can be improved here to reveal less of the background around the edge of the bird, but I did this quickly, and it probably looks fine. If I was going to print this I'd probably have refined the edges of the mask.)

Finally, making the lower layer visible (the one with level adjustments, but not sharpened) visible you get to see the soft background, and the sharpened bird.



This is a fairly simple technique to make part of an image sharper without changing areas that don't need the sharpening. Similar masking techniques can be used for a variety of things: selective contrast, selective lightening or darkening, etc.

With the images that I post I'm more likely to do selective levels adjustments, but this is a good technique and is worth keeping in mind when trying to post process an image.

View the final image posted here:


-Jon
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Photo Edit Technique - Selective Sharpening