Photoshop_User_February_2017

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photoshop user

› february 2017

066

SMART SHARPEN FILTER

The easiest and most effective tool

to use here is the Smart Sharpen filter

(Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen), which

I generally consider to be more useful

as a tool for “corrective” rather than

general sharpening. In Lens Blur mode,

you can use this to sharpen blurred

edges that aren’t quite in focus. This

filter got updated in Photoshop CC to

produce smoother-looking results with

less noticeable artifacts, although Smart

Sharpen is still rather slow compared to

using Unsharp Mask.

The Smart Sharpen filter has three

blur removal modes: the Gaussian Blur

mode makes it work more or less the

same as Unsharp Mask; the Lens Blur

mode is the more useful as it enables

you to counteract optical lens blur-

ring; and lastly, there’s the Motion Blur

removal mode, which can sometimes be

effective at removing small amounts of

motion blur from an image. After you’ve

selected a blur removal method, you can

use the Amount and Radius slider con-

trols to adjust the sharpening effect.

The image shown here was taken hand-held in low-lighting conditions using a wide

lens aperture and slow shutter speed. It needed substantial extra sharpening to make

the edges appear nice and crisp.

To sharpen this photo, I set the Remove drop-down menu to Lens Blur and applied an

Amount of 400%. Such sharpening can produce noticeable artifacts; however, you can

adjust the Reduce Noise slider to suppress these.

Here are two close-up views of the image showing how

it looked before and with the Smart Sharpen filter applied.