The the same image we used for basic sharpening, which is slightly 'soft' and needs a little sharpening.
This time I select 'Filter', then 'Sharpen' and then 'Smart sharpen'. As shown below.
When we make this selection, the following pop-up screen appears.
As you can see there are a number of options you can use with this pop-up to do various types of sharpening. I'm just going to cover
'Basic' 'Lens Blur'. There are other sharpening types such as 'Motion Blur' but I have not found these to be as affective or as easy to
use to date. The basic lens blur sharpening tool has two key components, the sharpening amount and the radius.
The radius determines how many
pixels either side of the determined edges are to be affected. You will need to keep this small. Anything from 0.5 pixels to 2 pixels maximum
will more than likely be sufficient. Try adjusting it within this range until you are happy. The amount is the amount of sharpening required,
that is how much contrast to produce between the edge pixels. The higher the the
value the greater the contrast, and hence the sharpening, will be. I keep this to a range between 50
and 150. Any more and the image can and will look over sharpened in most cases, but feel free to experiment to see what you prefer.
In this
case I think a radius of .7 and an amount of 70 is fine, but I'm not a fan of
over sharpening and don't mind a little softness. Below I show the unsharpened and sharpened images side by side.
