Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques

Tricks of the Trade

Now that we’ve talked about the general process of sharpening an image, let’s start to explore some more advanced ideas that will allow you to get more control over your sharpening.

Sharpen Luminosity

If you look closely at a color image after it’s sharpened, you might notice bright-colored halos around objects that were not all that colorful in the original photo. (In Figure 6.52, notice the green fringe around the blue shirt.) To prevent that type of unwanted sharpening artifact, choose Edit > Fade Unsharp Mask immediately after sharpening an image. When the Fade dialog appears, set the Mode pop-up menu to Luminosity and then click OK (Figure 6.53). That will force the sharpening you just applied to affect only the brightness ...