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The Secret to Using Color to Make Your Images Look Sharper

Chris Gampat
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05/23/2018
4 Mins read
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Last Updated on 05/23/2018 by Mark Beckenbach

Sharper looking images don’t only have to do with your lens and the clarity slider

Of course we can all sit here and talk about the sharpness of a lens and megapixels all day, but this article isn’t about that. What if you have only a camera, a lens, and perhaps some light: that’s it. What do you do in a situation like that? Well, the secret to creating a sharper image isn’t necessarily all that technological stuff but instead it’s all about utilizing the effectiveness of the human eye. Yes, you can fool the eye into thinking that a scene is sharper than it really is. That’s what this entire tutorial is about.

We’re Not Talking About the Clarity Slider and Sharpness Slider

Leica 28mm f1.4

Can the sharpness and clarity sliders do a great job with making the eye think that a photo is sharper? Sure. But they’re really not the be all end all. This is more about getting it right in camera, which you can absolutely do and that every single photographer should strive to do. That isn’t an absolute, but I want to equate it to the difference between two types of sandwiches. Let’s say that there are two different options:

  1. Option 1 is made with a fantastic chicken breast. Then its got lettuce, tomato, and onion in there, all freshly picked. The chicken was freshly made, and the bread is from a nice loaf made earlier this morning. It’s a bit more pricey though and requires more work.
  2. Option 2 is made with a frozen chicken breast, the lettuce seems to be going brown, the tomato looks wilted, and the onions are just blah. 

Now, which would you rather have? Option 1 seems to be the one that most folks would reach for if they could. Option 1 is synonymous to a photo where everything was gotten right in camera in the first place. Then you can modify it in whatever way you’d like in the same way that you can modify the sandwich in whatever way you’d like later on. So start with a solid image right out of the camera.

Deeper Blacks = A Sharper Looking Image

Moose Peterson says that the deeper the black levels are in your image, the sharper it can look. The simple reason for this is because when you deepen the blacks, you’ll make the human eye and brain ignore them and focus right on the color instead. In that way, the color will pop. The trick here though is balancing the black levels to be what you’d want them to be and to also ensure that the photo itself still has details visible in those black levels.

Just before I go on, I’m talking about black levels and sharpness relative to the entire image and not to the image being pixel peeped. Only photographers pixel peep, not clients.

You can see more about how black levels fool the eye in this tutorial and this tip.

Focus on Three Main Colors: Differentiate Them and Give Them Each Different Brightness Levels

Steve McCurry always did this in this portraits: use three colors. That means three different colors in the RGB spectrum. Most people, if shooting a portrait, will be associated with the orange, yellow and red tones of an image. So strive to make their wardrobe and the background all different colors. You can do this by starting out at 3200K or 5500K white balances. But then coordinate the wardrobe and the background.

Once that is done, make them all different levels of saturation and brightness. Again, make those colors really stand out against one another. That way the eye really differentiates everything in the scene.

Combine This with Depth of Field

What would this tutorial be without talking about depth of field and bokeh. When talking about colors in the scene, try to add even more pop to the image by using depth of field and out of focus elements. This will mean that the eye is focusing on a specific part of the scene and that specific color of the subject in focus will pop.

A Flash is Your Best Friend

We’ve said this a number of times, but flash is really your absolute best friend. Stop being a natural light photographer and start being an available light photographer. If you use a flash, you can add color and specularity to a part of the scene that wasn’t there before. In fact, specular highlights make a camera’s output even sharper than it is without it by enhancing the micro-contrast.

blacks camera clarity color depth of field flash lens Photography photos portrait sharpness
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.