I was concerned that the workshop was drifting into a seminar on the aesthetic meaning of hue and saturation. Yesterday alleviated that concern, and since then we’ve rocket-propelled into deep geek mode. Yesterday the light came on for me in two areas of Photoshop that had been deep mysteries before: Blending Modes and Alpha Channels. The Channels Palette had always thwarted my mastery before, partly because it is easy to get lost there. I practiced again and again how to add to selections and invert masks and combine multiple alpha channels into masks. Cool stuff.
Here is today’s cool tip, on sharpening. One of the artifacts of sharpening is its effect on highlights and shadows. There’s a simple way to control that. First, proper Sharpening hygiene requires that it occur on its own layer set to Luminosity mode. Double-clicking on a layer gets you into that scary box, the Layer Style. At the bottom is the "Blend If" dialog. You can cut off the sharpening at, say below 40 and above 240, and separate the other halves of the sliders (Alt-drag) to make a transition zone of 20 or so. Look at an image at 400% when you do this, and see how those blasted out highlights get corraled back to where they belong, but the sharpening of the image is retained.
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