Country Garden Gate

So, I spotted this country garden gate this afternoon. I liked the look of the moss on the top. Out comes the handy camera phone and presto. I was disappointed when I got it home. The exif data revealed that the shot was taken at 1/30 sec - a bit slow and sure enough, it was a little blurred. So, a few minutes with Photoshop CS and we have the photo below.

So what did I do? I first constructed a mask for the gate itself. Then added three layers. A levels, saturation and sharpening layer. So, a tweek of levels, a +15 saturation and a sharpening. I then inverted the mask and created a de-saturation layer with the inverted mask and desaturated -30. Its up to you to judge if it has produced a result.

I use a layer sharpening technique which involves making a copy of the layer to be sharpened, apply filter-other-high_pass, radius=6, set blend mode to hard-light. The benefit of this technique over filter methods - such as USM - is that it can be switched on or off as desired allowing you to see its affect.