Chapter 12. Sharpening

Photography: Wilhelm Scholz, Client: AEG Computer art: Robert Bowen, www.bowenstudio.com

Obviously, you failed to detect the subtle diamond pattern in my tie.

—Niles from Frasier

We'll cover the new Reduce Noise and Smart Sharpen filters in this chapter.

This chapter is about those very subtle details that can make the difference between a so-so image and one that pops off the page. Almost all digital images start life looking slightly soft. It's just a fact of life that all of our capture devices (digital cameras, scanners, and so on) can't deliver as much detail as the original image contained. (High-end drum scans are the one exception because they get sharpened during the scanning process.) Only images that are created from scratch in Photoshop or another program (like a 3D rendering application) will be 100% sharp to begin with. And even those images can become soft if you attempt to make the image larger or smaller in Photoshop (known as interpolating the image). Finally, when you output your image to an inkjet printer, printing press, or other output device, you will lose additional detail because most output devices simply are not capable of reproducing the amount of detail you see on-screen. By exaggerating the differences between areas (sharpening), we can attempt to compensate for all the factors that can make an image look soft.

After you learn to properly sharpen your images, you'll find that they look much more crisp when you print them and that they are an obvious improvement over unsharpened scans (Figures 12.1 and 12.2). But no matter how much sharpening we apply to an image, it won't compensate for an out-of-focus original, so try to stick with images that aren't overly blurry.