High Pass Sharpening in Photoshop CS3

The best way of sharpening your images in Photoshop, or one of the best ways I should say, is to use the high-pass sharpening technique. Since it is Photoshop there are of course a ton of ways to do things, but the best sharpening methods is using the high-pass or channels. In this tutorial we are going to be covering how you can do the high-pass sharpening inside of Adobe Photoshop booth in CS2 and CS3!

Step 1
Open up a photograph that you wish to sharpen in Photoshop.

Step 2
Press Cmd + J (PC: Ctrl + J) to make a duplicate layer of the background, photo layer.

Step 3
Change the blending mode of the duplicate layer to Overlay.
Step 4
Here is the part you can do different in CS2 and CS3. If you are using CS3 you can now take advantage of the Smart Filters, by going under the Filter menu and to Convert to Smart Filters and now we will be working on a smart object using smart filters which are non-destructive.

So go to Filter > Other > High Pass to apply the high pass filter, which is the way we are going to sharpen the photo. You see that in low amounts, it is sharpening the photo quite a big bit and in higher amounts it is creating a more surreal color effect. So once you are happy (and you’ll be seeing the preview live because we changed the blend mode to Overlay in the last step) with the result just hit OK and you’re done!