Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Sharpening Your Images

Digital cameras are wonderful, but often it’s hard to tell how well you’ve focused until you download the photos to your computer. And due to the way digital sensors process information, most digital pictures can usually be improved with a little dose of sharpening—a tricky maneuver whereby Elements appears to improve your image’s focus. Understand, when Elements sharpens your photo, it doesn’t magically correct the focus. Instead, it deepens the contrast where colors meet, giving the image a crisper appearance.

Most of the time, the best way to sharpen an image is by using the sharpening filters. (Filters are high-powered, but easy to use Elements tools which changes a specific aspect of a photo’s appearance.) If you go to Filter → Sharpen, your choices are Sharpen, Sharpen Edges, Sharpen More, and Unsharp Mask. As well as having the most counterintuitive name in all of Elements, the Unsharp Mask (Figure 12-2) is actually by far the most capable and versatile of the sharpening tools. (See the box in Section 12.2.1 for more information.)

The other sharpen filters aren’t complete slouches—they’re just not as good as the mighty Unsharp Mask. Here’s what they do:

• Sharpen, just as the name says, sharpens your image, but you have no control over anything. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it command with no adjustments. You can apply it repeatedly to build up the effect.

• Sharpen Edges finds areas where significant color changes occur and sharpens the adjacent pixels. This ...