Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

Control Highlight and Shadow Separately

When you sharpen an image, Photoshop will add a dark halo on one side of an edge and a bright halo on the opposite side of the edge. When you're working with dark backgrounds (like a deep blue sky), the bright halos can be rather easy to see (Figure 12.66). That's when you might want to try controlling the bright and dark halos separately so that you can minimize the bright halo while maintaining the dark one. You can accomplish that by making two duplicates of the layer you want to sharpen. Then, click on each of those duplicate layers and set the Blending mode at the top of the Layers palette to Lighten for one and Darken for the other (Figure 12.67). Now you can sharpen the two layers separately; the ...