Easy image sharpening in Photoshop

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

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.

Original Image of Desk
Original Image of Desk

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!

High Pass Original
High Pass Original

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!

Applying Overlay to the High Pass
Applying Overlay to the High Pass

Here’s the before and after

High Pass Before and After
High Pass Before and After

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

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