Angel 3

The sunlight came through the window just at the right angle as I was

taking the nativity photos at the school play.

Hello

What a charming pose. I think this one is the cutest or maybe it's the second one or the first of the three. They are all nice little fleeting moments. They all seem to be soft from movement and/or missed focus. Angel seems to be the sharpest on her left eye.  I played around with this one a bit to see what I could do to try to sharpen it up. You may like it just the way it is as it's such a cute pose. Just my 2 cents worth.

Regards

Greg

Thanks for the sharpened version. I prefer yours. What did you do so I can try to reproduce it on the original?

Hello Di

Thanks. As for replicating it. There are probably a few dozen ways to do it. Photoshop itself has a many ways of doing it let alone plugins. I'll give some ideas just using photoshop since I don't know if you have plugins or not. First duplicate the image Ctrl J. Go to filters>other>highpass. It will look strange, select a low radius. It varies the edges it will affect. There are a lot of variables depending on the image, since I'm working on a small low res screen capture I used 2.0. click OK. You will a a grey little thumbnail. Now on that layer change the blend mode to soft light. That will sharpen it a bit. Again with the original file you may get the results you want. Since I'm working on this small image I stamped a new layer, make sure you are on the top layer press and hold ctrl+shift+alt+E. That will stamp a new layer with all the changes up to that point. You can try filter>sharpen>smart sharpen and see if it will give you any additional improvement. A technique I use quite often in different ways is to duplicate the stamped layer, convert it to b&w, then on that layer go to fliters>other>high pass and select that radius that gives the best result. Then again change the blend mode to soft light or hard light and adjust the opacity to taste. If the colours have shifted you might need to add a hue/saturation layer and adjust the reds saturation and lightness to your preference. Like I said a lot of different ways to do something, it's up to you what works best for you. Again there are so many variables, image size, the degree of softness, personal taste etc. Hope this helps some and isn't confusing.

Cheers

Greg