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All of your photos are blurry and out of focus. You may think they look okay, but they all could look a lot better. This article will tell you how to sharpen and enhance any photo to make them look clearer and more in focus.
We as humans have a tendency to tolerate soft or out-of-focus photos unaware they can be dramatically improved. You would think high quality cameras and scanners would produce sharp images but that"s not the case. The process of transferring a three dimensional view into two dimensions mashes and destroys edges of items in photos.
This is the world"s simplest definition of an oddly named function that will brilliantly sharpen any photo and may already be in a program you own. The term is called Unsharp Mask. If you don"t know what that is, you should. Lots of photo software programs have the Unsharp Mask function. Using photo editing software you can apply this procedure to make any photo sharper with more visual appeal.
The benefits of this Unsharp Mask procedure are well known in the printing and graphics arts industries and have been for decades. Think about it for a moment; the older the photo or movie, the blurrier or more out of focus it is. Photos and movies became sharper through the years as these industries used a hardware version of the Unsharp Mask technique well before digital camera days.
Unsharp Mask is an overlooked way to improve photos that would make many of them pop off the screen or page. This is likely because few people understand it. All definitions of the term Unsharp Mask seem to be impossibly technical and difficult to grasp.
Greatly simplifying the actual process, if you took a picture, copied it, made the copy slightly more blurry than the original then blended the two back together, you would end up with what looks like the faint ghost of the original image. This is the filter or "mask" that Unsharp Mask uses.
Unsharp Mask recreates an image using the original, filtered through this mask like water through a water filter - the ghost or filter image defines edges more sharply than the original when mixed again. This resharpening or Unsharp Mask procedure always improves images to some degree and often results in an amazing, three dimensional look that visually grabs and absorbs you much more than the original.
There are five terms needed to understand Unsharp Mask. Most explanations have three: Amount, Radius and Threshold but understanding two more terms may help to understand it better:
Edge. Areas where items in an image begin and end. All objects have edges that are more or less clear or defined. Some objects will have gradual changes from one edge to the next, and others will have sudden changes. A waterfall will have many gradual edges. Buildings tend to have sharply defined or sudden edges.
Tone shift. Technically this is defined as adjoining areas having significantly different hue or tone. More simply a tone shift is the boundaries of places in the image where significant content changes. Think of a tone shift as the edge of one object and its opposite edge flipped over of the area that the edge is touching. Very simply, a tone shift is a double-edge.
Tone shifts have varying degrees of strength themselves depending on whether the content is gradually changing from one result to another, or whether the content change is abrupt or sudden as you look across the image. If you can grasp the concept of a tone shift, then the three values of the Unsharp Mask function become much more understandable:
Amount. Tone shift contrast.
Radius. Tone shift size.
Threshold. Tone shift definition.
That"s the shortest, simplest explanation you"ll find for these concepts, and while this greatly oversimplifies their meaning thinking of the three Unsharp Mask settings in this way can allow you to actually use it in photo editing software with more success. These three concepts more fully explained:
Amount. Tone shift contrast amount. The amount is a percent number used to tell Unsharp Mask how much contrast will be added to tone shifts.
Radius. Tone shift size amount. Tells Unsharp Mask how big or wide the tone shifts are. Radius will give tone shifts a glow or halo effect, especially if overused.
Threshold. Tone shift detail definition. Tells Unsharp Mask how wide a tone shift must be for it to be considered a tone shift. This allows Unsharp Mask to be applied without amplifying image noise or fine detail that doesn"t need sharpening.
Unsharp Mask Values. The numbers that actually go into the three values of Amount, Radius and Threshold can also be confusing. This is because the numbers are not of the same type and photo software can have their own definitions (and even names) for these settings. Amount is a percent, Radius is a number that can represent pixels or sometimes down to one-fourth of a pixel depending on the photo software, and Threshold is most commonly a value from 0 to 5: 0 will define everything as tone shifts to be sharpened, 5 will define only the largest tone shifts to be sharpened and beyond 5 usually has little effect because hardly any edge will be defined as a tone shift. However photo editing software can define the Threshold number setting much differently.
Because Unsharp Mask settings can be difficult to understand by reading the definitions, use photo editing software that has slider bars to get a feel for how Unsharp Mask behaves. The photo software should also show an automatic preview of the result as slider positions change. Photoshop®, Paint Shop Pro® and a photo enlargement software product called Imagener - http://www.imagener.com - have the Unsharp Mask with auto-preview function built into them. Imagener shows automatic previews of the full size image.
It takes practice to come up with the right combination of Unsharp Mask settings for an image, but use it if you have photo editing software that has this function keeping at least the simple definitions above in mind. All images will look better with Unsharp Mask applied often so much so that you will be amazed with the results.
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Source by Don Henderson
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