High pass sharpening is one of the popular sharpening techniques along with unsharp mask (USM) and lab color sharpening used by Adobe Photoshop users.
Capture NX is Nikon’s NEF raw workflow software and it has many innovative processing technologies. The best thing about it is that it offers most of what raw shooting photographers need without breaking the bank. Here is a tutorial on how to do the high pass sharpening using Nikon Capture NX.
1. Get the photo ready for sharpening
Go through your normal workflow in Capture NX including resize/crop to the point it is ready for sharpening. It is recommended to apply sharpening as the last editing step. The following photo is used for illustration purpose. To start, set the view to 100% (Ctrl-Alt-0) so you will be see the sharpening details.

2. Apply the high pass function
From the menu bar, go to “Adjust->Focus->High Pass …” as shown in the following screen capture.

Once you select the high pass function from the menu, the photo will be turned into a gray scale image similar to the following .

You will also be presented with a simple high pass setting dialog box with radius as the only option. The default for radius is 1. Going to value smaller than one does not seem to do anything visible, while you can see the details in the image changes as you drag the radius slider to the right (larger radius).

The high pass filter function attempts to block all image details, except from those details with very strong edge definitions. This results in a neutral gray image with only the edges of the original image appearing in the default normal blending mode. For sharpening purposes, the radius should remain small (1 to a few pixel depending on the final image size and details) so the sharpen happens at the very fine edges. Larger radius from tens to 100 px can be used for contrast enhancement purposes (will be discussed in a separate article).
For now, you can only drag the radius slide around and while you can see something change in the photo but it is most likely not what you are expecting. This is because the default blending mode (normal) is used. Since you really cannot change the blending mode here you can simply click OK to continue.
3. Fine tune the high pass sharpening
If you have not already done so, go to “Windows->Edit list” to open the edit list. Mine looks something like the below.

Expand the high pass item (item #4 in this tutorial) in the edit list by clicking on the small triangle on the left. You will see something like the following. Now you have two options under high pass: (1) the Opacity option, and (2) high pass option.

First, open the opacity option by clicking on the small triangle. Once opened, the triangle will point to the left and you will see the opacity option dialog box. Change the options so yours will look like the following. For sharpening purpose, we will only operate on luminance channel (chrominance channel slider is set to 0). The blending mode should be overlay. Click OK to continue.

Now you can open the high pass option (radius) setting dialog box again to experiment with the radius setting until you are satisfied with the result. In addition, you may also go back to the opacity option and play with the luminance channel opacity slider.
4. The result
Below is the final result from this tutorial. It may seem to be very subtle because I intentionally used a small radius of ~2px. Like all photo enhancements, it is easy to overdo the effect and make things unnatural.

5. Final words
I hope you enjoy reading this tutorial on high pass sharpening using Nikon Capture NX. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to use the comment box below.
Keywords: Capture NX, High pass sharpening, Nikon, Photo editing
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Well written tutorial, you’ve explained things well. great to see some information on what the capture programme can do in a language I understand, More Please!!
Pete,
Thank you for your comment. You may find some more Capture NX tips and tutorials by following this link:
http://dptnt.com/tag/capture-nx/
Max
Thanks for this and the other tutorials about NX. Besides Jason Odell’s e-book and the Nikon tips, this seems to be the only source of this kind of information. And the others don’t discuss high pass sharpening, so this tutorial is really useful. Maybe some time you could elaborate on the Blending aspect? I’ve followed your steps on an image of my own and they certainly work, but I don’t quite understand the blending part.
John,
The blending mode determines how the resulting adjustment is superimposed on the image before the adjustment. In this case, I used the overlay mode and applied the overlay blending only to the luminance channel to avoid affecting colors and creating color halos around the edges.
Max
Wow. I don’t think you could have made this any more simple and easy to understand. Glad I found you via the Capture NX Flickr group.
Thanks greatly!
My image nds up grey. What have I missed?
Bernard,
Did you change the blending mode to overlay? You may also need to zoom in a little bit.
Max
That worked! Thanks for the help.
you really made it clear. which is better; high pass or unsharp mask?
Bernard,
It depends on the photo. They work differently and one of them may be more effective for a given photo. I’d suggest you try both and evaluate the results to see which works out better.
Max
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