Sharpening with the High Pass filter

Sharpening with the High Pass filter in Photoshop is so easy, why I haven't been doing this all along I don't know! Well yea I do, I only just now figured out how to use it. I heard about this High Pass filter thing years ago but never tried it. Now that I have I'm like, WOW, why haven't I been doing this all along?

This High Pass sharpening is also really great if you have any noise in your photo, because it doesn't sharpen the noise like using the UnSharp Mask tool does.

I'll knock up some examples...brb

OK, Here is an image that I just played around with. Might not be the best example but it's the one I wanted to play with. :-)






As you can see in these small photos with the amount of processing I did the difference is subtle. On close inspection there is more noise in the Unsharp Mask one. I decided to push the High pass one to see how far I could push it before there was noticeable noise in the image and it looked over sharpened. This is my result:

I couldn't get this sharp an image from the above file with the unsharp mask filter without a lot of noise and a bit of distortion. I'm quite impressed with the High Pass way of sharpening images and will be investigating further.

Next I'll explain how I used the High Pass Filter.