Use A High Pass Filter To Quickly Improve The Detail In Your Photos Without Adding Noise


Here’s a quick and easy image editing tip to improve the detail of your photos without adding a bunch of noise.

This is very much a Photoshop tip, but the High Pass filter is something you can find in many image editors so you can absolutely perform this tip using any image editor that provides it. This is very easy to do and is demonstrated in the video above, but here’s an outline of the steps:

  1. Duplicate the only layer of your photo (the Background layer) so you have a second copy of it. Select the new layer in the Layers palette. We’ll call this layer the High Pass Layer.
  2. From the Filters menu, choose Other —> High Pass.
  3. Set the pixel radius to 5.0 (although you can experiment with other numbers if you like) and click OK.
  4. Set the blending mode of the High Pass Layer to Overlay, Hard Light, or Vivid Light. You probably will not notice much of a difference between each but try them all to see what works best for you.
  5. Use the eraser tool on the High Pass Layer to erase the parts of the photo where you don’t want extra detail, such as the person’s skin (if you’re using a photo of the person).
  6. Adjust the opacity of the High Pass Layer if you want to reduce the sharpness added by the layer.

That’s all you have to do. This process will bring more detail into your photos without adding noise and make it easy to control where you want that detail to be.

Enhancing Photos with High Pass Filter [Abduzeedo]


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