Sharpen macro photos

Emphasize sharpness with Photoshop CC’s High Pass filter

There are plenty of techniques for sharpening your photos, but few are as effective as High Pass sharpening. This method makes use of Photoshop’s High Pass Filter, which separates an image into high frequency and low frequency detail. It effectively allows us to target the edges in an image – where light pixels meet darker pixels and apply contrast to them, resulting in crisper and sharper details.

The High Pass technique is especially suitable for localized sharpening of specific areas of an image. If you think about it, when an image has out-of-focus, detail-less areas (as is often the case with macro photos) there’s really no need to apply universal sharpening to these areas, as all we end up doing is amplifying the image noise – not ideal at all.

So for certain images like this it’s better to selectively sharpen the parts that matter most. To help us do this, we can use a neat trick involving the ‘Focus Area’ command. This is a useful tool that automatically selects areas of an image that are in-focus – incredibly useful. Normally it’s used to isolate the subject for a quick cut-out, but here we can put the command to use seeking out the detail-rich areas of our image in order to sharpen them. This basically helps us keep everything else lovely and soft where it matters.