Photoshop Elements 6: 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 because of the way a camera's digital sensors process information, most digital image data usually 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 you want; see Adding Layer Styles.)

Note

If you've used early versions of Elements, you may be searching in vain on the Filter menu for the Sharpen filters. It's true—your old friends Sharpen and Sharpen More are gone. In their place, Adjust Sharpness appears at the bottom of the Enhance menu, along with Unsharp Mask. (Both of these features are explained in the following sections.) If you miss the one-click ease of Sharpen and Sharpen More, just head over to the Quick Fix and use its Auto button to get the same effect.

Unsharp Mask

Although it sounds like the last thing you'd ever want to do to a photo, Unsharp Mask reigned as the Supreme Sharpener for many generations of image correction, despite the fact that it has 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. (Its name refers to a complicated darkroom technique that ...