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Real Photography closed in December 2014 and is no longer accepting clients.

Thank you for your support over the years! Please follow me at my new personal blog: www.needlesandapen.com to keep up with my latest photography, craft, and nursing school adventures.

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Apr 06, 2008

This morning as I was trying to create a unsharp mask versus high pass sharpening comparison picture, I really wasn’t seeing much of a difference. I set about researching it, and it turns out that unsharp mask is basically a high pass filter. Same effect, just two different ways.

Which proves one more time that for every desired effect in Photoshop, there are a zillion ways to go about doing it.

Posted in Photoshop Tips

(Photoshop Friday and Scrapbook Saturday are a day late this week thanks to BOTH my blog AND Photoshop wigging out on me yesterday.)

Whenever you are about to print a photo or share it online, one of your last steps should be to sharpen it. Whenever you resize your photo–either making it larger OR smaller–you’ll need to sharpen it.

Here’s the picture we’ll be working with:

denver family portrait bubble blowing

I have always used the “unsharp mask” feature (FILTER>SHARPEN>UNSHARP MASK):

photoshop tutorial screenshot

Next you get a little pop-up window that asks you to pick your settings. This is the setting I usually use, but I think every photographer finds one that they like best:

sharpen mask photoshop tutorial

Yesterday a fellow photographer taught me a new technique that I like a lot.  It gives you a little more power to fine tune the effect.

Start by making a duplicate layer of your photo (LAYER>DUPLICATE LAYER):

Then you head over to the filter drop-down again, but this time you’ll select OTHER>HIGH PASS:

It will give you another pop-up prompt. Pick something around 30px:

Now it’s time to make the scary gray disappear. In your layers menu, change it from “normal” to “soft light” and then adjust the opacity of the layer to whatever seems right.

And there you have it–two different ways to sharpen your photos!

Posted in Photoshop Tips

When I was at Barnes and Noble yesterday trying to purchase something with my violated credit card, this is what I was purchasing:

photo of wedding magazine

One of the pictures I took while second shooting weddings for Laura Dombrowski Photography was picked by The Knot to illustrate cute orange decorations! (Laura is a fantastic Denver wedding photographer well worth checking out if you are a Colorado bride!)

That photo (which you may recognize from our wedding site contact page) is a great example of how getting closer can provide an entirely different photo. It began with this idea I had of a picture of the flower girls (they were already standing in a group waiting for the reception to start, so I simply had them bring their flowers together):

I wasn’t crazy about everything going on in the background, but then I realized that I had another great photo right there. Without moving anything except ME, I stepped in quickly and took this second shot:

Colorado Springs wedding photographer\'s picture featured by The Knot Best of 2008 Weddings

Just another example of how many ways there are to take different photographs of one subject. If I hadn’t thought to take one step closer, we wouldn’t have been able to do a happy dance over my photo being published in The Best of 2008 Weddings magazine by The Knot!

Posted in NewsWedding Photographer