Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom, Second Edition

Chapter Four. Sharpening Tools: Learning to Sharpen

Thus far, this book has been fairly long on theory and short on practice. In this chapter, we’ll switch focus to looking in depth at what the tools Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw, and Adobe Lightroom offer for sharpening images, and how to use them effectively in a capture-to-output sharpening workflow. The tools themselves are important, but there’s a world of difference between simply running the Unsharp Mask filter on a flattened image and running it on a layer with an edge mask: The former uses a tool, while the latter employs a technique.

So in this chapter, we’ll explain the basic tools, but we’ll also discuss using those tools in ways that may not be obvious. Of course, Photoshop always ...