Sharpen the edges of a portrait without sharpening the skin. This sharpening technique detects edges and applies sharpening only to the edges.

To start, we'll apply a simple sharpening to the image.

Edge Sharpening Photoshop Tutorial

Step 1

Open a photo you would like to edit. Or, you may use the photo used in this tutorial (from iStockPhoto).

Step 2

Duplicate the layer and apply your desired sharpening technique on the new layer. Some basic sharpening tools are available in the Filter> Sharpen> menu. For this tutorial, we will use the luminance sharpening technique which only sharpens the grayscale data and leaves the color data untouched. However, to do this, we’ll need to change the image mode to LAB color. Because changing the image mode too much will affect the image quality, in the next step, we’ll create a duplicate state to apply the luminance sharpening to.