Ikkyblog

Digital photographs are a little soft by nature. Most require at least one pass of sharpening, and often require more than one to look their best on the web. In this tutorial, I am going to show you the Adamus sharpen technique. This is a more drastic sharpen, particularly with landscapes, but is only useful for web quality pictures.

3. Adamus Sharpen
From your full size image, re-size your image to somewhere between 1000 and 1500 pixels on the long end. Try to keep it at double the size of the image that you intend to finish with. Go to Image > Image Size.

For this example I want to end up with a 750px image, so I am starting with 1500px. Make sure you re-sample as Bicubic, not Bicubic Sharper.

If you have done any editing to your image on multiple layers, before this next step you will need to flatten the image.

Duplicate your your layer and label it sharpen1.

Then go to Filter > Sharpen and run sharpen.

Duplicate the sharpen1 layer and label it sharpen2. Then go to Filter > Sharpen and run sharpen again. This will give two passes of sharpen on this layer.

Now duplicate the sharpen2 layer and label it sharpen3. Then go to Filter > Sharpen and run sharpen again. This will give three passes of sharpen on this layer. This will give it a highly over sharpened look, but don’t be alarmed. It will not stay that way.

Now re-size the image to the web size that you intended, in this case 750px. Make sure you re-sample as Bicubic, not Bicubic Sharper.

You will end up now with three sharpen choices. Simply choose which layer gives you the best result and then save for the web. Below is the before and the three sharpens. Click on the image for a larger view.