- Choose the Smart Sharpen filter. Go
to the Filter menu and choose Sharpen→
Smart Sharpen to display the Smart
Sharpen dialog box, complete with a
cropped preview, as you can see in
Figure 7-4. When the Preview check box
is turned on, Photoshop applies the ef-
fect to the larger image window as well.
Preview is turned on by default, and I
can think of only two reasons to turn it
off: First, you may want to compare
before-and-after versions of an image, and
second, you’re working on a large image
and the program just can’t keep up with
your changes. Figure 7-4.
Virtually every image you edit will require some amount of sharpening.
This means you’ll be choosing Smart Sharpen a lot. To save you some effort
(the damn thing’s in a submenu, after all), I’ve assigned it a shortcut. If you
loaded dekeKeys, as I advised in the Preface, you can invoke Smart Sharpen
by pressing Shift+F6. My logic? Smart Sharpen has two S’s; Shift and 6 (of
F6) do too. For whatever reason, that’s been enough to stick it in my head.- Set the zoom ratios for the image previews. Press Ctrl+1 (�-1)
to set the image window to the 100 percent view size. Then click
a couple of times on the minus sign (–) below the preview in the
Smart Sharpen dialog box to reduce that preview to 50 percent.
Now you can gauge the results of your changes in two ways.
Why did I use 100 and 50 percent? Because the 100 percent view shows you
every pixel in the image, and the 50 percent view more closely represents
the image’s appearance when printed, at which point more pixels are
packed into a smaller space. But assuming that you have an OpenGL-
compatible graphics card, you can use any zoom ratios you like. They all
display smoothly (something that could not be said of Photoshop versions
before CS4).- Set Remove to Lens Blur. The default setting for the Remove op-
tion—Gaussian Blur, which highlights edges in gradual, circular
patterns—duplicates the one and only behavior of the Unsharp
Mask filter. And although Gaussian Blur does a serviceable job,
the Lens Blur setting enjoys a higher degree of accuracy and is
better suited to reversing the effects of the soft focus, particularly
in digital photography. Think of it as Photoshop’s next-generation
sharpening algorithm.
Sharpening an Image 221