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Garry Black Photography

Question:

When I sharpen an image in Photoshop using the Unsharp filter, I find sometimes that there is too much noise (grain) appearing in order to get the image looking sharp enough. What should you do to get better results?

Answer:

Here is a tip for sharpening with the unsharp mask filter. Once you have determined the "amount" setting value (lets say it's 100), go to the channels palette and activate only the Red and Green channels, do not select the Blue channel as it tends to produce more noise than the other channels after sharpening. When you open the Unsharp Mask dialogue box do not enter 100 as the amount. Instead divide 100 (or whatever other value amount you wish to use) by 4 use this amount (25 in this case) and apply the filter four times. That's all, give it a try, and let me know what you think.

Another tip is if you have a blue sky in your image, de-select the sky from your selection to sharpen. In other words don't sharpen the sky!