Sharpness

Modern digital cameras have internal algorithms and advanced optics to minimize blurring occurance. In spite of this, blurring can still occur quite often even using professional optics. While pictures with heavy blurring cannot be digitally improved, a small-average amount of this problem can be easily corrected using Focus Photoeditor.

Unsharp Mask Filter:

Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.

Unsharp masking (USM) is a traditional film compositing technique used to sharpen edges in an image. The Unsharp Mask filter corrects blurring introduced during photographing, scanning, resampling, or printing. It is useful for images intended for both print and online viewing.

Unsharp Mask locates pixels that differ from surrounding pixels by the threshold you specify and increases the pixels' contrast by the amount you specify. In addition, you specify the radius of the region to which each pixel is compared. The effects of the Unsharp Mask filter are far more pronounced on-screen than in high-resolution output. If your final destination is print, experiment to determine what settings work best for your image.

To use Unsharp Mask to sharpen an image:

Click on the preview button to see how the image looks without the sharpening. Drag in the preview window to see different parts of the image. Our advice is to see the preview in real size

Do one of the following:

Change the Amount to determine how much to increase the contrast of pixels. For high-resolution printed images, an amount between 3.50 and 5.0 is usually recommended.

Change the Radius to determine the number of pixels surrounding the edge pixels that affect the sharpening. For high-resolution images, a Radius between 1 and 2 is usually recommended. A lower value sharpens only the edge pixels, whereas a higher value sharpens a wider band of pixels. This effect is much less noticeable in print than on-screen, because a 2-pixel radius represents a smaller area in a high-resolution printed image.

Change the Threshold to determine how different the sharpened pixels must be from the surrounding area before they are considered edge pixels and sharpened by the filter. To avoid introducing noise (in images with fleshtones, for example), experiment with Threshold values greater than 0.

Here is an example of USM:

Clarify:

Auto > Clarify

There is also a special automatic correction in Focus Photoeditor called "Clarify" that takes the best from the Unsharp Mask filter and from Contrast adjustment.