Selective sharpening
If you've done even a little editing of digital images, you'll know that sharpening is one of the most important steps in your image-editing workflow. Unfortunately, it's also one of the hardest steps to get right. What the Unsharp Mask isn't really is to sharpen your image. That would require increasing the image detail, which is impossible. Instead, the Unsharp Mask employs an optical illusion to fool us into thinking that those blurry edges are sharper. One tip is to always evaluate sharpness by looking at the actual pixels (100 percent) view.

Level: Intermediate
Time needed: About 15 minutes

1. Select Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.

2. In the Unsharp Mask dialog box, experiment with the three slider bars -- Amount, Radius and Theshold -- and see the results in the preview window.

The key to obtaining good results is the Radius setting. It controls the width of the sharpening halo. Next, set the Amount. This dictates the strength of the sharpening. A small Radius setting will need a higher Amount. Finally, set the Threshold. This tells Photoshop to ignore a certain amount of difference between pixels when sharpening, and allows you to avoid oversharpening lightly textured areas such as skin tones.

As a guideline, start with an Amount setting in the 200 percent to 300 percent range and a Threshold of zero, and work the Radius setting until it matches the image content. Then adjust the Amount setting until the desired degree of sharpening is obtained. Finally, if necessary, increase the Threshold to smooth out oversharpened areas of texture. When that is done, you will notice that your photo is sharpened just the way you want it.

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teresaseminara
15/05/2007 02:35 AM

I messed up on my digital camera and ended up deleting all my pictures from my card! i doubt this is possible but is there anyway of restoring the photos

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