The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Finishing Touches in the Detail Tab

By now your image should be looking pretty good. By adding a few finishing touches to it via the Detail tab, you can restore some of the "pop" that was lost in the digital capture process. Two control areas are available to you in this tab: Sharpening and Noise Reduction. Most of the time you'll be using Sharpening, but I'll say a few words about Noise Reduction too.

Input Sharpening

Let's start with sharpening your picture. At this stage of the game we refer to this process as "input sharpening." The goal is to restore some of the detail that was lost in the process of capturing the image. Later on, in Photoshop, you'll probably do some output sharpening too. But we'll use different tools for that endeavor.

Figure 4-12. Input sharpening in the Detail tab

To get started in ACR, click the Detail tab (the third tab from the left) and note the four control sliders: Amount, Radius, Detail, and Masking. Here's the basic description of each:

Amount Controls how strong the effect is

Radius Refers to how many pixels out from the edge are affected by the sharpening

Detail Helps to control the halo effect you sometimes see in sharpened images

Masking Lets you create an edge mask controlling what gets sharpened and what doesn't

At first, the procedure might seem unintuitive, but once you've gone through the process, you'll really appreciate these tools.

Start by setting ...