Here’s a new sharpening technique that I had not seen before but works very well, particularly with low light images. It uses a combination of Photoshop with Unsharp Mask, Topaz DeNoise and then back to Photoshop for another pass with Smart Sharpen before using blend modes to apply the sharpened layer with the original color layer.
There are several examples of the technique in the video walk-through above.
[via Topaz Labs]
This is really cool and right off I am going to try this to see if I can fix a panoramic I botched up a few years ago. (I deleted my best focus shots by accident for one section on a pano and was left with a sub par version of what could have been one of my favorite sunrises.) I can’t wait to see if I can fix it with this technique! The best part is that while I don’t usually care for “plug in” software I do have Topaz DeNoise and use it quite regularly. It is actually the only plug in I have.
I have to say I have tried this technique and it works quite well even on photos without a lot of noise.