Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

Every now and again I learn something here and the other day I came across a thread from a member trying to get the most out of his birding pics, in the discussion the High Pass filter came up, and although I had heard about it before I did not know how to use it, and this is somewhat embarrassing because I have been using Photoshop for over 20 years and have always just relied on the Unsharp Mask filter. At any rate I took a few minutes and went through a Photoshop tutorial and learned how to use the High Pass filter, it is a much better tool that is for sure.

Here are some of the pics I used to learn this tool, the two eagles in a food fight were previously pretty much unusable even for display on a monitor, they are not a whole lot better now but they are in fact better.

These images as always been resized for posting, unless that they were so heavily cropped as both eagle shots were that resizing made no sense.

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EyeShootWideOpen Loc: Florida

Beautiful images. Thanks for sharing you knowledge as well.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I particularly like the pose in the last image. That's an especially nice image.

Did you use a mask on the high pass filter to apply it selectively? I ask because the background of the 2nd shot seems to show some "craziness".... More than I would have expected out of a Canon 500mm f/4 lens w/1.4X on it. That can happen with the high pass sharpening technique, but may be preventable by using a mask to limit the sharpening effects to the only subject and other portions of the image that are within the plane of focus.

The 3rd & 4th shots both appear to have been only lightly and selectively sharpened.

I still use unsharp mask and even smart sharpen at times... but also use the high pass method a lot. To me, it seems more "controllable" than the other methods.

kpmac Loc: Ragley, La

Outstanding set.

EyeShootWideOpen Loc: Florida

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

I agree about the control, that is why I was happy to use this technique, the images of the Sandhills I used a gradient mask to isolate the background on either side of the birds and then desaturated, some may like it some may not, kind of a personal taste thing and since I shoot RAW I don't have to live with it should I decide I don't like it.

Bmac Loc: Long Island, NY

Nice shots Blurry.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

I didn't understand your question yesterday, I think that you are right, it was simply conversion to a smart object and then the high pass filter applied to the entire image. That image is pretty heavily cropped so it could be something to do with the high pass filter, I think that I used about 2.5 or 3 pixels, I am not sure which camera that image was shot with, I use both a 5DIV and a 5DSR, I think that they would probably want to be processed a little differently because of the pixel density.