This screen shot is what you see immediately after setting up Russell Brown's Layer Sharpening method. What? Never heard of the Russell Brown Layer Sharpening Method? Stop right here and go watch this QuickTime Movie that demonstrates Russell's fantastic Layer Sharpening Technique.

Click Here For Russell Brown's Layer Sharpening Tutorial

Like I was saying, this screen shot is what you see immediately after setting up Russell Brown's Layer Sharpening method. The next step is to flatten the layers and you are finished ~ that is if you want to apply this sharpening to your entire image. But what if you only want to apply this sharpening to part of your image?

I would like for this amount of sharpening to remain in the dresses and jewelery of our subjects, but would like to eliminate or at least reduce the amount of sharpening that is applied to their faces. (Ladies almost never like to see their faces sharpened!)

In order to have some portions of the image sharpened and other portions remain like in the BACKGROUND layer, we need to end up with two layers: one sharpened and one never sharpened background layer.