This is one of my burrowing owl images where I need to sharpen just the two owls. For the tutorial I have oversharpened the subjects just so they show up better against the unsharpened background
Sharpening should always be the very last stage in post processing, so having opened the image in photoshop and cropped, adjusted the levels etc and flattened the image, duplicate the background layer - "layer, duplicate layer"
Apply unsharp mask - "filter, sharpen, unsharp mask" and vary the amount, radius and threshold to suit. At this stage the whole image is sharpened
Now we apply a layer mask and paint over the areas we dont wish to sharpren - choose a soft edged brush around 4/500 pixels depending on the size of the image, press "D" on the keyboard to set foreground / background colours to black and white - pressing "X" on the keyboard will toggle from black to white and back again
Now paint over the areas you do no wish to sharpen - pressing " \ " on the keyboard will highlight those areas
If you make a mistake, press " X " on the keyboard to change the foreground colour from black to white and paint over the area you dont wish to mask
Press " \ " again to remove the highlight and when satisfied flatten and save the image
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