The Photoshop® CS Book for Digital Photographers

Sharpening Close-Up Portraits of Women

If you need to sharpen a close-up portrait but want to keep your subject’s skin as smooth as possible, here’s a technique used by fashion photographers and retouchers that enables them to apply sharpening without overly enhancing pores, wrinkles, or any imperfections in the skin. It’s simple, but it works.

Step One.	Open the close-up portrait you want to sharpen using this technique. © BRAND X PICTURES [View full size image]
Step Two.	If you apply sharpening to the RGB composite, or even the luminosity of the image, you wind up accentuating the texture of the skin (which is a bad thing if your goal is to ...