Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Sharpening Images

Digital cameras are wonderful, but often it's 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 you want; see Gaussian Blur: Drawing attention to an object.)

Note

If you've used early versions of Elements, you may be searching the Filter menu in vain looking 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 Quick Fix and use its Auto Sharpen button (Sharpening) to get the same effect or go to Enhance → AutoSharpen.

Unsharp Mask

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 it 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. (Its ...