Digital cameras are wonderful, but it’s often hard to tell how well-focused your photos are until you download them to your computer. And because of the way cameras’ digital sensors process information, most digital image data needs to be sharpened.
Sharpening is an image-editing trick that makes your pictures look more clearly focused. Elements includes some almost miraculous tools for sharpening your images. (It’s pretty darned good at blurring them, too, if that’s what you want; see Gaussian Blur: Drawing attention to an object.)
Although it sounds like the last thing you’d ever want to use on a photo, Unsharp Mask reigned as the Supreme Sharpener for many generations of image correction, despite having the most counterintuitive name in all of Elements.
To be fair, it’s not Adobe’s fault. Unsharp Mask is an old darkroom term, and it actually does make sense if you know how our film ancestors used to improve a picture’s focus. It refers to a complicated darkroom technique that involved making a blurred copy of the photo at one point in the process.
For several versions of Elements, Unsharp Mask ranked right up there with Levels as a contender for most useful tool in Elements, and some people still think it’s the best way to sharpen a photo. Figure 7-22 shows how much a little Unsharp Mask can do for your pictures.
Figure 7-22. Left: The photo as it came from the camera. Right: The same photo treated with a dose of Unsharp Mask. Notice how much clearer the individual hairs in the dog’s coat are and how much better defined the eyes and mouth are.
To use Unsharp Mask, first finish all your other corrections and changes. A good rule of thumb for sharpening is “last and once.” Unsharp Mask (or any sharpening tool) can undermine other adjustments you make later on, so always make sharpening your last step. Repeatedly applying sharpening can degrade your image’s quality.
Tip
An exception to the rule about sharpening only once is when you’re converting Raw images (The Raw Converter): You can usually sharpen both in the Raw Converter and then again as a last step without causing problems.
If you’re sharpening an image that has layers, be sure the active layer has something in it. (Applying sharpening to a Levels Adjustment layer, for example, won’t do anything.) Also, perform any format conversions before applying sharpening. Finally, you may want to sharpen a duplicate layer just in case you want to undo your changes later. Press Ctrl+J/⌘-J to create the duplicate layer.
Note
It’s helpful to understand just exactly what Elements does when it “sharpens” your photo. It doesn’t magically correct the focus. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t really sharpen anything. What it does is increase the contrast where colors meet, giving the impression of crisper focus. So while Elements can dramatically improve a shot that’s a little soft, it can’t fix that old double exposure or a shot where the subject is just a blur of motion.
When you’re ready to apply Unsharp Mask:
You can use Unsharp Mask in either Full Edit or Quick Fix.
Adjust the settings in the Unsharp Mask dialog box until you like what you see.
Move the sliders until you’re happy with the sharpness of your photo. (The following list explains what each slider does.) In the preview part of the dialog box, you can zoom in and out and grab the photo to adjust which part you see. It’s also a good idea to drag the dialog box off to the side so that you can watch your actual image for a more global view of the changes you’re making. You get the most accurate look at how you’re affecting the image if you set the view to 100% or Actual Pixels.
When you’re satisfied, click OK.
The Unsharp Mask sliders work much like other tools’ sliders:
Amount tells Elements how much to sharpen, in percent terms. A higher number means more sharpening.
Radius lets Elements know how far from an edge it should look when increasing the contrast.
Threshold controls how different a pixel needs to be from the surrounding pixels before Elements considers it an edge and sharpens it. If you leave this setting at zero—which is the standard setting—Elements sharpens all the image’s pixels.
There are many, many different schools of thought about where to move the sliders or which values to plug into each box. Whatever works for you is fine. The one thing you want to watch out for is oversharpening. Figure 7-23 explains how to know if you’ve gone too far.
Figure 7-23. The perils of oversharpening. This is just a normal pumpkin, not a diseased one, but oversharpening gives it a flaky appearance and makes the straw in the background look sketched in rather than real. The presence of halos (like those along the edge of the pumpkin) is often your best clue that you’ve oversharpened an image.
You’ll probably need to experiment a bit to find out which settings work best for you. Photos you plan to print usually need to be sharpened to an extent that makes them look oversharpened on your monitor. So you may want to create two separate versions of your photo: one for onscreen viewing and one for printing. Version sets in the Organizer are great for keeping track of multiple copies like this.
Unsharp Mask has been around since long before digital imaging. A lot of people (including the folks at Adobe) have been thinking that, in the computer age, there’s got to be a better way to sharpen, and now there is. The latest tool in the war on poor focus is Adjust Sharpness.
The Unsharp Mask tool helps boost a photo’s sharpness by a process something like reducing Gaussian blur (Gaussian Blur: Drawing attention to an object). Problem is, Gaussian blurring is rarely the cause of your picture’s poor focus, so there’s only so much Unsharp Mask can do. In real life, blurry photos are usually caused by one of two things:
Adjust Sharpness is as easy to use as Unsharp Mask, and it gives you settings to correct all three kinds of blur—Gaussian, lens, and motion. When you first open the Adjust Sharpness dialog box, its settings are almost identical to those of Unsharp Mask. It’s the extra things Adjust Sharpness can do that make it a more versatile tool. Here’s how to use it:
Make sure the layer you want to sharpen is the active layer.
See Chapter 6 if you need a refresher on layers.
Go to Enhance→Adjust Sharpness.
You can reach this menu item from either Full Edit or Quick Fix.
Make your changes in the Adjust Sharpness dialog box.
As shown in Figure 7-24, the dialog box gives you a nice big preview. It’s usually best to stick with 50 or 100 percent zoom (use the plus and minus buttons below the preview to zoom) for the most accurate view. The settings are explained in detail after this list.
When you like the way your photo looks, click OK.
The first two settings in the Adjust Sharpness dialog box, Amount and Radius, work exactly the same way they do in Unsharp Mask (Unsharp Mask). Here’s what the other settings do:
Remove. This is where you choose what kind of fuzziness to fix: Gaussian, lens, or motion blur, as explained on Adjust Sharpness. If you aren’t sure which you want, try all three and see which works best.
Angle. In a motion blur, you can improve your results by telling Elements the angle of the motion. For example, if your grip on the camera slipped, the direction of motion would be downward. Move the line in the little circle or type a number in degrees to approximate the angle. (It’s awfully tricky to get the angle exactly right, so you may find it easier to sharpen without messing with this setting.)
More Refined. Turn on this checkbox and Elements takes a tad longer to apply sharpening since it sharpens more details. Generally you’ll want to leave this setting off for photos with lots of little details, like leaves or fur (and people’s faces, unless you like to look at pores). But you might want it on for bold desert landscapes, for example, or other subjects without lots of fiddly small parts. Noise, artifacts, and dust become much more prominent when you turn on this box, since they get sharpened along with the details of your photo. Experiment and watch the main image window as well as the preview to see how this setting affects your photo.
Tip
Although Amount and Radius mean the same things as they do in Unsharp Mask, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can just plug your favorite Unsharp Mask settings into the Adjust Sharpness dialog box and get the same results. You may prefer very different numbers for these settings for the two tools.
Some people who’ve used Smart Sharpening in the full-featured Photoshop swear they’ll never go back to plain Unsharp Mask. Try out Adjust Sharpness—Elements’ version of Smart Sharpening—and see if you, too, like it better than Unsharp Mask. To give you an idea of the difference between the two methods, Figure 7-25 shows the dog from Figure 7-22 again, only this time with a dose of Adjust Sharpness instead of Unsharp Mask. Some people consider Adjust Sharpness just too darned fiddly to use, so feel free to go back to Unsharp Mask if it works better for you. (And Mac folks, don’t forget that you also have the option of sharpening in Preview [Touch-Ups]).
Unsharp Mask is definitely the traditional favorite, and Adjust Sharpness is the latest thing in sharpening, but there’s an alternative method that many people prefer because you apply it on a dedicated layer and can lessen the effect later by adjusting the layer’s opacity. Moreover, you can use this method to punch up the colors in your photo as you sharpen. It’s called high-pass sharpening.
Figure 7-25. Here’s the terrier from page 261, only this time he’s been sharpened using Adjust Sharpness. Notice how much each hair in his coat stands out, and how much more detail you can see in his nose and mouth.
All sharpening methods have their virtues, and you may find that you choose your technique according to the content of your photo. Try the following procedure by downloading the photo tiles.jpg from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds:
Open your photo and make sure the layer you want to sharpen is the active layer.
Duplicate the layer by pressing Ctrl+J/⌘-J.
If you have a multilayered image and you want to sharpen all the layers, first flatten the image or use the Stamp Visible command (see the box on Stamp Visible) so everything is on one layer.
Your photo now looks like the victim of a mudslide, buried in featureless gray. Don’t panic—that’s what’s supposed to happen.
In the High Pass dialog box, move the slider until you can barely see the outline of your subject.
Usually that means picking a setting roughly between 1.5 and 3.5. If you can see colors, your setting is probably too high. (If you can’t quite eliminate every trace of color without totally losing the outline, a tiny bit of color is OK.) Keep in mind that the edges you see through the gray are the ones that will get sharpened the most. Use that as your guide for how much detail to include.
Click OK.
In the Layers panel, set the blend mode for the new layer to Overlay.
Ta-da! Your subject is back again in glowing, sharper color, as shown in Figure 7-26.
Figure 7-26. Left: A close-up look at the original photo. Right: High-pass sharpening using the Vivid Light blend mode makes the colors stand out more, but it also makes all the tiles a bit coarser and rougher looking than they were in the original. For high-pass sharpening, you can use any of the blend modes in the group with Overlay, except Hard Mix and Pin Light. Vivid Light can make your colors pop, but watch out for sharpening artifacts (page 263), since they’ll be more vivid, too. Overlay gives you a softer effect.
Tip
There’s yet another way to create “pop” in your photos: the Clarity setting in the Raw Converter (Adjusting Vibrance and Saturation), which sharpens and enhances contrast at the same time. (If you know what “local contrast enhancement” means, this setting does something similar.) You can use it on Raw, JPEG, and TIFF files. It’s especially useful for clearing haze from your shots.
Elements also gives you a dedicated Sharpen tool for working on specific areas in your photo rather than the entire image. It’s a special brush that sharpens the areas you drag it over; Figure 7-27 shows it in action. To get to it, go to the Blur tool or press R, and then choose the Sharpen tool from the pop-out menu.
Figure 7-27. The Sharpen tool isn’t meant for sharpening whole photos, but it’s great for sharpening details. Here, it’s being used to touch up the details in the middle statue. (The red arrow helps you find the circular cursor.) Approach this tool with caution: it’s super easy to overdo it. One pass too many or too high a setting and you start seeing artifacts right away.
The Sharpen tool has some of the same Options bar settings as the Brush tool (see Picking and Using a Basic Brush for more about brush settings). It also has a few settings all its own:
Mode lets you increase the visibility of an object’s edge by choosing from several different blend modes; Normal typically gives the most predictable results.
Strength controls how much the brush sharpens what it passes over. A higher number means more sharpening.
Sample All Layers makes the Sharpen tool work on all the visible layers in your image. Leave it off if you want to sharpen only the active layer.