Sharpening masts and guy wire

[Jaded62]

Hi folks.

My normal editing process in PS for land and sea scapes is to use the quick selection tool to select the sky (and sometimes the sea), apply a mask, invert, then use Smart Sharpen.

Sometimes this is problematic and this image is I think, a good example. I want to sharpen the boats which is easy enough to do by selecting them and everything in front of them, including the water but that would leave the masts and guys unsharpened, which is a bummer as I think they are a key element.

Selecting the masts and guys seemed to me too hard or maybe impossible so I've done one image globally sharpened, one not at all. To my eye the better image is not sharpened.

Interested to know peoples thoughts on this and possible methods.

Not sharpened


Sharpened

[Boo53]

I must admit I prefer the sharpened for the majority of the image, but the clouds in the upper right are better unsharpened. Perhaps mask out the top 1/2. I don't think the masts/cables would be noticably effected doing that

[ameerat42]

With straight sharpening methods such flimsy image elements can be problematic - the selecting
being one. (Only as an aside, the unsharpened version looks pretty natural to me.)

For such fine lines, perhaps first carefully select a small area, then use the Blur/Sharpen brush,
and tidy up with the History Brush. If you look at the pic portion below, the steps are:
1) Set the Magic Wand tool as shown, select bits of adjacent sky, and when ready, INvert the
selection.
2) Apply you sharpening method (The brush shown gives lots of good control), and if you make
some inadvertent small errors, apply the
3) History brush, usually at 100% and Normal to completely reverse it at that local level.

Your pic portion...
shrpening1.jpg

[Tannin]

Jaded62, I don't think you want to be sharpening those masts anyway. Sharpening essentially increases contrast at the borders of objects and as a result always creates artifacts. Now with a large object (such as a boat), that tends to go unnoticed, but with a long, narrow object only a few pixels thick (like a mast) enough sharpening to make them stand out is probably going to be enough to show up as artifacts. Besides, as you know, it's almost impossible to select them.

So what else can you do? Easy! Dodge and burn is your friend. A good dodge and burn utility (the one in Photoshop is excellent) selectively darkens dark-ish pixels without touching lighter ones (that's burning) and/or lightens light spots without touching dark ones (dodging). Simply select "burn", set the tool to "shadow", set the opacity to a very small number (4% is often good) and wave the burn brush over the area you are interested in. You don't have to be precise, and you can go over it two or three times to get just as much as you want.

As a rule, a little subtle dodge and burn is more visually effective than a lot of mucking about with fancy sharpening, and really easy to do.

This is the one and only thing I actually miss since I got rid of Photoshop: the dodge and burn module. DxO Photo Lab (my preferred raw converter and editor) has many advantages over the Adobe products but it doesn't have dodge and burn at all. (It has other things you can use instead, in many cases much more sophisticated ones, but I often just want good old dodge and burn.) For that reason I bought Affinity Photo which was a mistake. For some inexplicable reason, Affinity's D&B module doesn't work properly, it burns everything, not just the dark bits you want it to do, and apparently they don't intend to ever fix it as they like it the way it is. More wasted money.

One more thing: those particular images have oodles of contrast, colour, and visual interest. If anything, they are already a fraction overcooked. Don't get carried away with boring post-processing tricks, let the natural beauty of the scene and your obvious skill with a camera do all the heavy lifting.

[jamesmartin]

I prefer the un-sharpened image. I really can't offer anything else as my processing of images is only very basic.

[ameerat42]

Mark, not necessarily in reply to your request here, but another sharpening technique is by
using a High Pass filter. You use two layers, make the top one (usually) an Overly blend, then
apply the (Filters - Other -) High Pass, with a pixel setting of about 1.5. You can vary the
effect using the layer opacity (and other ways). You also get some pretty strange tonal
variations along the way, but the final result should be a somewhat sharper image.

[Tannin]

I prefer the un-sharpened image. I really can't offer anything else as my processing of images is only very basic.

I hadn't actually looked at the two pictures which head the thread, or even realised they were the same one (!) as I had a clear memory of your pictures from an earlier thread and glanced over them. But now James has woken me up, I opened the two up at full size and yes, the first unsharpened one is much superior.

[Jaded62]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

I think what I've learned from this is that sharpening is not always required, or even wise.

Resizing and saving to jpg does nothing for those guy wires either. I knew this was true but it is very evident with this shot. The pic as finished is 8500 x 4500 pixels but for posting as a rule I resize to 2000 on the long side.

The image below is 4000 on the long side and the guys are much better defined I think.