The Photoshop Unsharp Mask filter gets its name from a traditional darkroom process used to sharpen an image. The Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop works by increasing the contrast around the edges in an image, which makes them look crisper and sharper.
Even the best photographers can find it a challenge to capture a perfectly focused photograph, especially when shooting with a camera set to a wide aperture. The resulting shallow depth of field can make it difficult to get all of the key areas in focus, which makes image sharpening in the digital darkroom all the more imperative.
Learn how to use Adobe Camera Raw to sharpen photos for printing without exacerbating noise or creating halos in our latest Photoshop Elements tutorial.
The ability to sharpen an image after you’ve taken it is a saving grace. Sometimes a shallow depth of field or a wrongly chosen autofocus point can mean that key details in an image are soft. Using the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop can bring back these lost details, and prevent an otherwise great photograph from being destined for the recycle bin.
In this Photoshop tutorial, we’ll show you how to blur the background in Photoshop and sharpen detail in your foreground interest. Here we’re going to apply two layer masks to our snowy egret image: one to sharpen the fine feather details and one to blur out the background.
The easy option for digital sharpening is to ramp up the in-camera sharpening setting. However, some shots need more sharpening than others, and if you apply too much then image quality can fall. Digital sharpening isn’t applied to RAW files, but if you shoot JPEGs, any in-camera sharpening is permanent.
This useful technique will help bring sharper detail to soft-looking wildlife shots without adding unwanted artefacts. When photographing wildlife with a wide aperture setting (such as f/5.6) you might find that the animal’s body is sharply focused while its face appears a bit soft. This is because wide aperture settings produce a shallow depth of [...]
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Great shots with superb composition and perfect metering can be easily totally ruined by a lack of sharpness.
From tripods to cable releases, we give you the best advice to help you take the sharpest shots ever There’s nothing better than checking the LCD on your camera after a shot to reveal amazing composition and light. And there’s nothing worse than checking the sharpness back home on the computer and seeing a blurred [...]
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