Evening class
Photoshop guru Martin Evening sorts out your photo-editing and post-processing problems
Martin evening on how to optimise sharpness
BEN PIKE’S image combines creative skill with technical expertise and was shot using a Canon 7D with an EF 100mm f/2.8 lens. Captured at the widest lens aperture, the focusing is pin-sharp on the insect’s head and renders the background in beautiful soft focus. When editing this I aimed to apply the same treatment as Ben. I rotated the photo 180° so that the insect appeared to be the right way up, and lightened the Exposure setting. Because the detail on the insect was important, I took care to apply the optimum sharpness settings here.
1 Rotate the image
The first thing I needed to do was to rotate the image. I did this by clicking twice on one of the rotate buttons in the Tools section at the top to rotate the image 180°. I then selected the Crop tool to crop the image more tightly on the right and lightened the Exposure setting.
2 Basic panel adjustments
In this step I wanted to refine the Basic panel tone settings. I first added a touch more Contrast and lightened the Shadows. Next, I pressed Shift and double clicked both the Whites and Blacks sliders to auto-set the black and white clipping points for this image.
3 Detail panel sharpening
I enlarged the preview and went to the Detail panel where I adjusted the Camera Raw sharpening sliders to suit the image content. In this step I increased the Amount setting this to 45. I also lowered the Radius slightly and increased the Detail and Masking settings.