I was messing around with sharpening today, and had this dilemma of (imagine this said whilst moving the slider backwards and forwards) "Oh no, too harsh! Damn, not sharp enough!". Then I had an idea that should have been obvious. Duplicate the background layer, do lots of sharpening on that, then blend it with the original by reducing the opacity to about 40 or 50%. The unsharpened original seems to make the effect less harsh, whilst still allowing it to look pretty sharp. Hooray!

Something else too... I've found using LAB mode (as opposed to RGB) really useful for certain things. Mostly curves. In RGB, increasing the contrast (which I usually do with curves) also increases the colour saturation, and you might not want that. In LAB mode, you can edit the 'lightness' curve separately, so that decouples contrast from saturation. Again, hooray! This might be useful if you've already edited the saturation to your satisfaction, but want to adjust the contrast again.

Also, how I usually increase saturation these days is done using LAB mode. I create a new curves adjustment layer, and edit the 'a' and 'b' channels by moving the black and white points inward by the same amount on each. You have to do it symmetrically otherwise the colour balance gets screwed up. I generally move them inwards to -80 and +80, depending on the image. Then just adjust the fill opacity of the curves layer to how you want it.

If any colours are left a bit too bright, it's easy to adjust them downward using the saturation tool as you usually would. This is generally a problem with yellows.

Anyway, I hope someone finds all this interesting or useful!



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