Sharpening Alternatives in Elements

It is my firm belief that the Unsharp Mask remains the most satisfactory approach to sharpening in the Adobe Photoshop Elements. The tool in Elements is virtually identical to the one in CS4. There are masses of references, advice sites, tutorials, opinions etc based on this one tool. If used in combination with Layers and or tools like the great new "Quick Selection" tool you can exercise great control over the process and selectively sharpen parts of an image, which is especially useful in the event of small focussing errors.

The "Sharpen" tool (which resides with the icons down the extreme left of the screen) is more correctly a brush and can sharpen small areas of detail if required. On occasions it can be worhwhile but is hard to use well and requires much practice to do so. Close examination often reveals lots of sharpening artifacts where it is used

The last sharpening facility I shall deal with is the "Adjust Sharpness" tool which sits immediately below the Unsharp Mask on the Enhance drop down menu. This tool is based on the excellent "Smart Sharpen" tool in CS3 and CS4. It was seriously intended to supplant the Unsharp Mask by approaching the compromise between sharpness and noise from a different direction. It retains the Amount and Radius settings for sharpness control but omits the important Threshold slider which serves to minimise increasing noise while sharpening.

Most noise is evident in shadow areas and so in the Smart Sharpen tool a flexible facility is provided for fading the effects of sharpening in noise prone areas. Very clever. It also incorporates a means of minimising motion blur with an "angle" dial. Theoretically it can tidy up some pictures made blurry or soft by slight camera movement in a way previously denied us.

All of this is very flexible, very powerful and calculated to improve an image's perceived sharpness with a minimum of damage to fine detail.

Unfortunately, when transferring Smart Sharpen to Elements in the form of the Adjust Sharpness tool, the designers (for some reason which leaves me astounded) removed the powerful "Shadows" and "Highlights" tabs which facilitate sharpening without highlighting noise. Consequently, for most images, most of the time, Adjust Sharpness in Elements is effectively the Unsharp Mask with the Threshold setting taken away. What (may I humbly ask) was the point of that? Words fail me. Of course the motion blur removal device is still present but I have yet to be entirely convinced of its benefit in practice.

Well that's all for now. Next time I shall look at Noise Reduction in Elements ... oh and Merry Christmas!