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Photoshop is adept at detecting "edges." By which I mean, areas in your photographs where luminance levels shift rapidly. When Photoshop spots an edge, it can enhance its contrast, giving the impression of greater sharpness. What sharpening can't do, of course, is go back in time and readjust the focus in your camera. In other words, it can't fix blurry images. But, what sharpening can do is take a well-focused image and make it look even crisper. In this in-depth article, we'll look at the fundamentals and core techniques of sharpening.

It might surprise you to know that there are five Sharpen commands in Photoshop's Filter menu alone---not to mention related filters such as High Pass and Emboss---making sharpening the most predominant filter effect in the application. Photoshop's wide array of sharpening options gives you an enormous range of control and flexibility.

In this article, we'll look at the fundamentals and core techniques for sharpening images---specifically, how to apply the right amount of sharpening while minimizing noise and other artifacts.

This article is based on Chapter 15, Sharpening Details, from Deke's comprehensive video course Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced for lynda.com. Read more » 

If you're a photographer confronted by extreme-contrast lighting, you're typically forced to choose whether the shadows or highlights are more important and then throw the other end of the tonal range under the bus. That's because your camera's dynamic range can't capture the wealth of luminance levels the real world contains. Enter Photoshop's HDR Pro, which lets you conquer high-contrast scenes by combining the brightness values from a set of bracketed exposures. The result is rich detail in both the shadows and highlights with smooth tonal transitions in between. It takes more effort than a snapshot, but the rewards are enormous.

In the previous article, we looked at how Photoshop's HDR Toning and HDR Pro commands both work inside the magical (and largely imaginary) 32-bit floating-point editing space to manipulate tones. I also explained how the HDR Toning command is the luminance equivalent of upsampling, since it simply exaggerates the tones in a single image. In this article, we'll look closely at how the HDR Pro command works something like a multipass scan---or, if you prefer, an oversample in the world of music recording---to make the most of the 32-bit space.

Today's tip comes from Chapter 33, "High Dynamic Range (HDR Pro)," part of Deke's exhaustive video course Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery for lynda.com. Read more » 

Photoshop's HDR Toning and HDR Pro commands give you unmatched power to finesse tonality in high contrast images, gracefully coaxing detail out of shadows and highlights that would otherwise be murky or blown. Use HDR Toning on single images such as portraits for a faux HDR effect. You can dramatically exceed your camera's dynamic range by processing multiple exposures of the same scene with HDR Pro. In this tip, we'll look at how HDR processing works and the HDR Toning command. We'll continue with HDR Pro in the next tip.

Today's tip comes from Chapter 33, High Dynamic Range (HDR Pro), part of Deke's video course Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery for lynda.com. Read more » 

Photoshop's Black & White and Channel Mixer commands are powerful methods for converting the color photos (that nearly all digital cameras are hard-wired to produce) into rich monochrome images. You can then take those images several steps further by colorizing them to produce extraordinary duotones and polychromes. In this tip, we'll look at these commands, as well as other ways to create black-and-white and faux-color images in Photohshop.

Today's tip comes from Chapter 18, "Black &White and Colorize," part of Deke's video course Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced on lynda.com. Read more » 

Pardon me for my impertinence, but I have an idea. I think the powerfully enabled but abysmally named Smart Objects ought to be called "Magic Wrappers." Because, when you wrap a layer in a Smart Object, you can apply filters and other "destructive" edits to it without harm. Not to mention, change your mind later.

The Smart Object lets you adjust edits like Shadows/Highlights, Gaussian Blur, and even Puppet Warp as many times as you like without starting from scratch. Just double-click an item in the Layers panel to pick up where you left off. That alone makes these wonderful wrappers invaluable. But there's a lot more that you can do with them, as I'm about to explain.

Today's tip hails from Chapter 29, "The Power of Smart Objects," from the video course Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery on lynda.com. Read more »