Easy image sharpening in Photoshop

Here's a simple tip I picked up to quickly sharpen images in Photoshop using the High Pass Filter.

• October 18, 2007
• Updated September 19, 2024

Quick sharpening ¶

Here’s an image of my new desk taken with my camera phone. You can see that the quality is not great. Really it needs to be sharper. Thankfully photoshop allows a simple way to quickly sharpen images.

It is good practice when you are changing an image to take a copy of the layer. This way if anything goes wrong you can revert to the original. So first of all I’m duplicate the layer.

Then on the layer copy apply the High Pass filter. You’ll find this under Filter > Other > High Pass. Here’s what we end up with - horrible!

But fear not. Change the blend mode to Overlay. You’ll find this option in the Layers Panel. Apply that and the image is sharpened!

Here’s the before and after

A simple tip but one I found I have already used over and over again.

Tags

• Photoshop

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