I almost always do a little sharpening on my images. That's because as good as my EF 500 L IS F4 lens is, the picture is never completely,
100% sharp. Often close to 100% but never 100%. So a little sharpening is in order. However, don't think that sharpening can fix a badly
blurred or out of focus image.
There are number of ways to sharpen in Photoshop, such as the basic sharpen filters, the unsharp mask and the smart sharpen
feature, to name a
few. The latter function being introduced in Photoshop CS2. We're not going to cover all of these in this simple tutorial. Largely because
I don't use some of them or use them very infrequently. There is a sophisticated sharpen technique that involves creating a mask to find
the edges and then using this mask to sharpen just the edges within the image. This is complex to do but tutorials on how to do this can
be found on the web.
The two I am most familiar with are the simple sharpen and smart sharpen and these are the ones described below. Remember to display your
image at 100% size so that you can check the effect of your sharpening
accurately. Always try to do sharpening last, after any other
adjustments and definitely after resizing your image.
Basic image sharpening using Photoshop CS2.
Smart sharpening using Photoshop CS2.
