From the course: Designing a Photo Book

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Sharpening your photos

Sharpening your photos

From the course: Designing a Photo Book

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Sharpening your photos

After adjusting the tone and color balance of your images you'll also want to sharpen them. Sharpening makes your images more punchy. It especially emphasizes any textural detail in the image. There are several tools that can be used to sharpen images. In Photoshop the two easiest methods are applying either the Unsharp mask filter or the Smart sharpen filter. Both achieve a sharper result by accentuating edge detail. Sharpening will not bring an out of focus image into focus but it will remove a layer of fog from your images you hadn't even known was there. It's only when you compare the before and after that you realize how much the image needed sharpening. Almost every image will benefit from sharpening. Depending on the subject of the image, and the amount of edge detail, it contains. Some will benefit dramatically. While for others, the improvement will be subtle. There's a lot of information about image sharpening here at Lynda.com including a section of one of my own titles…

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