Having spent far too much time fiddling with photos over the last few years and trying to balance reducing noise, with preserving detail, and then trying to sharpen that detail without sharpening the noise and plunging back to square one, I've had a bit of a slapped forehead moment in the last few weeks.
Selective sharpening. In my defence, the reason it's taken so long is because it's staggeringly easy to do in Capture (another point in its favour) while I suspect it's a bit more complex in PS - which is where you come in.
In Capture, I can set the sharpening levels (or anything for that matter, this method works with all the adjustments, including noise reduction, gaussian blur, b/w conversion etc) and then just click on the slection brush and brush the adjustment onto the picture. Sharpening eyes while leaving skin nicely noise reduced is a thing of simplicity.
But what is the easiest way of reproducing this on PS? Layer masks?
I ask because my free trial on Capture NX 2 runs out on Monday, leaving me with my Capture NX on the horrendously slow, old and electrified Dell, or CS 2 on the work Mac (which also involved DNGing my NEF files thanks to Adobe's policy on ACR upgrades)
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