Hi there
as I promised here is the tute for "smartsharpen", at first sight it looks complex and longwinded but believe me it's easier than it looks and is worth the effort
Smart sharpen is a system whereby we can increase the amount of unsharp mask we use.
Under normal use, if we apply too much unsharp mask it can have some quiet unpleasant effects. Basically what is happening is that the effect is spreading out from the area such as edges –where we want the effect, into the other areas thereby distressing a large part of the picture. A halo of lighter pixels one or two pixels wide is one thing, it manages to trick the eye into seeing a sharper edge, but when we lighten the little buggers all over the place, that’s not so good.
The trick is simple; all we have to do is mask the areas we don’t want affected. How to do it is a little more difficult, but that is where Photoshop has a few tricks.
As said it is rather a long winded but effective procedure but once learned doesn’t take long, so rather than explain how it works I think it would be easier to run through the method, then when you have done it a couple of times the penny will click as to what you are doing – that is when you can start to modify your masks to suit each individual job. The artist takes over from the technician.
STEP1 go to image-mode and change to lab colour
STEP2 open channels panel and make a new channel (arrow at top right of panel or icon on bottom
STEP3 Make lightness channel active, go to picture and hit control+A, then control+C (this makes a copy of the channel)
STEP4 now make your new (alpha) channel active and hit control+V (paste) and wallah! Your picture should have reappeared.
STEP5 got to filters-stylise-find edges
STEP6 Go to filters-blur-gaussian blur. Now we find that the more we blur the lines the wider but more indistinct they become – for a start try maybe a level of 3.5 (the width of these lines is the area that we will sharpen)
STEP7 we will now make the lines distinct again without narrowing them so go to image-adjustment-levels and sample the dark lines with the black eye dropper and the light areas with the white eye dropper. You may want to play with the droppers until you get a definite black line
STEP 8 Go to select-load selection, when the box opens make sure you put a tick in the box marked invert. You have now selected the lines and should see the line of ants stomping around, if you switch to quick mask you can when you are more confident – modify your selection even further.
STEP9 almost there: switch back to the colour channel and then to layers, you should now have your colour photo with a selection and are ready to sharpen it.
STEP10 go to view and untick extras, the ants will have disappeared, all we have done is to hide them so that they don’t obstruct our vision – the selection is still there
STEP 11 now we can apply our unsharp mask at levels that were not practical before and the effect is confined to our selected areas
STEP12 clean up any areas inadvertently affected
STEP 13 don’t forget to change back to the original mode whether it was rgb grayscale or what, otherwise you may have problems saving
Gary as this posted on his website complete with illustrations if that will help
http://www.restoring-photos-made-easy.com/Smart-Sharpening-Using-Unsharp-Mask.html Denn
