One tool that I really love in Photoshop is the HighPass filter. It’s a favorite of photographers who want to get a really sharp looking image. And the results are pretty stunning. Check out this image from an Abduzeedo tutorial covering the filter.

LINK: Photoshop Quick Tips #3 – Enhancing Photos with High Pass Filter

It’s a really cool effect. But what about us Nukers out there who want to give our comps that same love? Well that’s what this tutorial is going to show you, step by step. And at the end you’ll also be able to download a gizmo I made especially for this tutorial. So…let’s get to it.

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1) The first step is make three copies of your image’s Read node. I’m going to be using this image below, so feel free to download it to your computer so you can follow along.

2) Now you’re going to invert your image, so go to Color / Invert.

3) Now we’re going to create a Merge node by pressing ‘M’, and setting the operation to ‘Average’. What you’re going to get is a solid grey image. Why? Well when you boil it down it’s just simple math. What we’re doing is essentially canceling out the image by averaging inverse pixel values between 1 and 0. Where 1 is white and 0 is black, the average between is .5. Which is…you guessed it…grey.

4) Now what good does a grey image do us? Well not much. Not until we apply a blur to our inverted image to bring out the high pass detail. Or more exactly, bring out the highest pixel values and mute out the lowest. Which gives us…

5) This is starting to look a lot more like the Photoshop filter isn’t it? Now all that’s left is to De-saturate it (which is optional BTW), apply a Sharpen filter to it to get that last little bit of detail, and increase the contrast by manipulating the multiply and gamma sliders inside our Grade node. Then just create a new Merge node, putting our new image on top of our source and set the operation to Multiply. And we’re all done! Check out our results…

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That’s it really! And all in 5 easy steps.

You can get the gizmo I made for this tutorial as well by heading over to The Lab. Just follow the link below and download away!

LINK: The Lab – HighPass

As always, let me know what you think about this tutorial and the included HighPass gizmo in the comments below! If you have any requests for techniques or effects you’d like me to mess around with in Nuke, that’s the place to let me know! Since you guys asked for it, I’m currently getting a Color Correction for CG to live action integration tutorial put together. And I’m also playing around with the idea of starting to do some these as video tutorials. Is that something you all would be interested in?  I kind of hope so because I hate typing and I’m a horrible speller, so you’d be saving me from myself.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Until next time…