Unsharp Mask

Photoshop Top 40, Feature #5: The Sharpen Filters

Submitted by deke on 16 March 2010 - 12:15am.
Feature #5: The Sharpen Filters

About a dozen years ago, I engaged in the only cosmetic surgery of my life (so far!), LASIK. It corrected my far vision. But now that my aging crystalline lens is as impliable as a piece of beef jerky, I require reading glasses. And there's not a thing Photoshop can do about it.

Photoshop is similarly incapable of correcting a photograph that was captured or digitized out of focus. Consider the following examples. In the first, the image is simulated to be out of focus using Photoshop's powerful (but not Top 40) Lens Blur filter. In the second, I slather on a heaping helping of the Smart Sharpen filter with little evidence of positive transformation, not to mention lots of clipped highlights and shadows.

sharpened blurriness

Compare that to the same image as it was actually captured by Jason Stitt of the Fotolia image library. With accurate focus at its disposal, the Smart Sharpen filter is capable of rendering tactile detail, even with a tiny Radius value (the number after the slash below).

sharpened focus Read more » 

. Tagged with:

Martini Hour 013, In Which Colleen Revels in Classic Simplicity

Submitted by colleen on 5 May 2009 - 12:12am.

After the entertaining wildness of a couple of episodes with John and Russell, Deke and I decided this week to have a quiet tete-a-tete with just the two of us: shoes off, classic martinis, and some classic Martini Hour segments like the secret handshake and reader mail. (Oh, not to worry, we've got some wonderful guests lined up for upcoming episodes, but for now we're relaxing in the eye of the loungy storm.)

Here's a graphic that is only possible with the information imparted during this week's show. Check it out:

Read more » 

. Tagged with: