Basics: sharp as a knife!

I guess it goes without saying that it's of great importance that the subject of your picture should be sharp. In focus and sharp. 

When doing a portrait shot, you'll want to focus on the eyes. When the eyes are in focus and sharp, you'll really create the feeling that the person in the picture is actually looking at you, the viewer. Use a low aperture and focus.   

When out and about to shoot some awesome landscape pictures, you'll want to create an image where the whole scene is in focus and sharp. In that case use a higher aperture than with portrait shots. For example I shot this landscape in Queenstown New Zealand on F14.

Every now and then you'll want to give your pictures just a tad more sharpness in post processing. Sweet and easy with software like Lightroom and Photoshop.

So in Lightroom it's very easy to sharpen an image in the develop panel: go to Detail. 

The exclamation mark offers you the possibility to zoom in. That way you have more control over the amount of sharpness you want to apply to the image.

With the amount slider you can add sharpness to your image. The more to the right, the more sharpness you apply. Do keep an eye out for over sharpening. That'll really mess with your picture. 

The radio and detail sliders are a bit more technical. Personally I'm in favour of using them rather than the amount slider. This guy did a great job in explaining about these sliders in this article.

The masking slider works well as a mask. You can mask out areas where you don't want the sharpeness. This actually works really well for skies. You'll want to have a really sharp sky. So by clicking ALT and move the slider to the right it masks out part of the image and where your picture becomes black, extra sharpness will not be applied. 

So now if you work in Photoshop, there are several ways to add sharpness. You can find them in the filter menu. 

 

I usually work with the unsharp mask. In this article you can find more information about sharpening in Photoshop.

But there is another way in Photoshop to sharpen an image. It's called High Pass and you can find it in the filter menu: Filter > Other > High Pass. 

How does this work?

1. Open the image and do your editing. Sharpening is usually the last step in your workflow.

2. Select the top layer and click on CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + ALT + E to create a new merged layer.

Now you havea new layer (layer 1)

3. Filter > Other > High Pass

Move to a part of the image where it's very important to be sharp, for example the eyes. 

With the radius slider, you than add more sharpness by dragging it to the right. Click around to see what amount works best for you and then click on OK. Radius around 1 pixel is mostly considered OK. But look at your image and see if its enough and not over the top.

4. Change the blend mode of the layer to Overlay

5. Now you added sharpness to the image. Final step is to flatten the image (Layer > Flatten Image)

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