THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS YOU’LL EVER DO TO A PHOTO
5
Recognise artefacts
To help you learn more about sharpening artefacts, push the
Amount slider up to 150% to see a dramatic change in edge
contrast. Increase the Radius to 50 pixels to increase the spread of the
edge contrast change. This creates ugly artefacts such as blown-out
highlights, dark clipped shadows and over-saturated colours. As a rule,
don’t exceed a Radius value of 2.0 to help avoid creating over-
sharpening artefacts.7
Extra options
If your photo suffers from shake-induced blur (due to a slow
shutter speed) then you might want to try setting the Remove
menu to Motion Blur. You can then drag the Angle wheel to try to
counteract the direction of the blur. In practice this doesn’t tend to
work well. You may be tempted to tick the More Refined box, but this
tends to add extra sharpening artefacts such as noise (especially if
you’ve captured the shot using a high ISO setting), so just click OK.6
Remove lens blur
Drop the Radius slider to 2.0 pixels. Click and hold down the
mouse button over the preview window to see the unsharpened
version of the photograph, then release the mouse button to see how
much the slider settings are sharpening it. For more subtle but
effective sharpening, set the Remove drop-down menu to Lens Blur.
This helps to reduce artefacts such as haloes (noticeable lines clinging
to the edge of contrasting edges).8
Shadows/Highlights in Elements 14
So far we’ve been using the standard sharpening tools in the
Adjust Sharpening dialog. Elements 13 does have a More Refined
box (see Step 7) which has questionable value, but in Elements 14 this
has been replaced by Shadows/Highlights options. If you expand this
section of the dialog you’ll see sliders for adjusting the strength of the
sharpening in shadow and highlight areas. For most photographers,
though, this degree of complexity is probably a step too far.