P H O TO S H O P F O R D I G I TA L P H O TO G R A P H E R S

Day Nineteen
Instructor:
Scott Kelby

Todays Lesson:
Sharpening, Day 2
The most popular advanced sharpening technique used by
professional photographers

Key Concepts:
One of the problems with sharpening is that if you apply too much sharpening to color photos you get
color artifacts (color spots) and color halos (little halos that appear around edges in your image). The way
many professionals get around this problem is to convert the photo to Lab mode and then apply the
sharpening to only the Lightness channel. This avoids sharpening the color (which is contained in the a
and b channels of Lab). Heres how its done:
(1) Go under the Image menu, under Mode, and choose Lab Color.
(2) Go to the Channels palette, and click on the Lightness channel.
(3) Now apply the Unsharp Mask filter. You can often apply it twice in a row without harming your photo.
(4) Convert back to RGB mode.
The other key concept in this lesson is to add automation to the process (since its rather tedious to
sharpen like this every time). You do that by going to the Actions palette and creating a New Action that
records your steps as you do them, and then lets you play them back either by pressing the Play button in
the Actions palette, or by pressing the F-key of your choice (chosen when you create a new action).

Keyboard Shortcuts Used:

No new keyboard shortcuts were introduced in this session.

Additional Material Not Covered In Class:

If you have a folder full of photos and you want to apply the Lab Sharpening action you created during
todays lesson, just go under the File menu, under Automate, and choose Batch. When the dialog appears,
where it says Play choose your Lab Sharpening Action. Under Source choose the folder full of photos you
want to sharpen. Under Destination, choose Save and Close, then click OK and Photoshop will open each
photo, run the sharpening action, and close it, all automatically.