You might think that your pictures are occasionally too grainy or smooth. You can increase contrast at the borders of things by sharpening them.
An excellent approach to boost details or the quality of an image before printing is to sharpen your photos in post-processing.
Photoshop offers various sharpening options that are more flexible than the typical sharpening slider available in most photo editing software. You may modify the sharpness of an image with a range of tools, filters, and masks in Photoshop (or blur).
Let’s see How To Sharpen An Image In Adobe Photoshop:
What Does Image Sharpening Mean?
Digital images can be given a more professional look and feel by using the image sharpening technique. It can fix several problems, such as blurriness, low contrast, and even lens distortion.
By increasing the contrast between items in an image, the sharpening makes the objects appear more distinct and clear. Turning relatively fuzzy visuals into crisp and finely defined ones, sharpening makes it simpler to see what is on the screen.

Why Is Image Sharpening So Important?
Sharpening can assist in highlighting features in your image that can be challenging to perceive.
To make photos stand out, you can improve clarity and contrast or sharpen the pictures without changing the colours.
To make all your photographs come to life and stand out, sharpening an image can help you increase the depth of field.
Sharpening Suggestions
An image’s edges are better defined after sharpening. Most photographs, whether created with a digital camera or a scanner, can be sharpened.
The quantity of sharpening needed depends on how well the digital camera and scanner perform. A blurred image cannot be fixed by sharpening, so keep that in mind.
Advice for sharpening more effectively:
- Create a separate layer for your image’s sharpening so you can go back and adjust it for output to a different medium.
- To prevent colour shifts around edges, use Luminosity as the layer’s blending mode while sharpening your image on a separate layer.
- Through sharpening, your image’s contrast is boosted. Now use layer blending parameters to avoid pointing under certain regions if, while sharpening a separate layer, and realize whether highlights and shadows are clipped.
- Before sharpening, reduce image noise to avoid amplifying it.
- Sharpen the image various times in tiny steps. When sharpening for the very first time, users may remove blur when they capture the photograph (scanning it and instead taking a photo of it using their smartphone). Your image should be sharpened once more (or a copy of it should be sharpened) to add the right degree of sharpening for your output medium after it has been colour adjusted and scaled.
- If possible, test your work by publishing it to the intended medium. Sharpening requirements vary depending mostly on the output medium.
If you want more flexibility while sharpening your photographs, use the Unsharp Mask (USM) or Smart Sharpen filters. The Sharpen, Sharpen Edges and Sharpen More filter choices are also available in Photoshop, although they are automatic and lack settings and options.
Sharpening a picture could be applied globally or only to a specific region using a selection and a mask. Because Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen filters are only available on a single layer at such a time, you may have to combine layers and even flatten the image to sharpen multiple image layers inside a multilayered file.
Learn how to sharpen an image in Photoshop to give your subject greater prominence, drama, and volume.
1. Apply Smart Sharpen To Sharpen
Unavailable sharpening controls with the Unsharp Mask filter are present with the Smart Sharpen filter. The methodology for sharpening can be changed, and you can also manage how much sharpness is applied to shadow and highlight regions.
- To see the sharpness clearly, 100% zoom the document window.
- Then select Smart Sharpen under Sharpen.
- Set the Sharpen tabs’ controls as follows:
- Amount
Establishes the sharpening intensity. A larger value improves the contrast between edge pixels, creating the impression of sharper edges.
- Radius
The radius determines how many pixels are around the sharpened edge pixels. The bigger the radius parameter, the wider its edge effects, and the more obvious it’s sharpening.
- Reduce Noise
(Photoshop only) Reduce unnecessary noise while preserving crucial edges.
- Remove
Establishes the algorithm that will be used to sharpen the image.
- Gaussian Blur
The Unsharp Mask filter employs a technique known as Gaussian Blur.
- Lens Blur
The edges and details in an image are detected by lens blur, which results in the sharper sharpening of detail and less sharpening halos.
- Motion Blur
By attempting to lessen the effects of blur brought on by camera or subject movement, motion blur. If you select Motion Blur, set the Angle control.
- Angle
Angle determines the motion’s direction for the Remove control’s Motion Blur option.
- More Accurate
When using the heritage option (which was introduced in CS6), the option becomes available for use and processes the file slowly for more precise blurring removal.
4. Using the Shadow and Highlight tabs, you may adjust how sharply light and dark regions are defined. (To make the tabs visible, click the Advanced option.) These parameters, which are only available for 8-bit and 16-bit-per-channel images, can be used to lessen the dark or bright sharpening halos if they appear to be overly strong:
- Fade Amount
changes how much of the highlights or shadows are sharpened.
- Tonal Width
Tonal width determines the overall spectrum of tones which are adjusted with shadows and highlights. Slide the slider towards the left and right to alter the Tonal Width value.
While utilizing lower values, only its lighter sections could be modified for highlight correction, while only the darker regions could be modified with shadow correction.
- Radius
Radius controls the percentage of a pixel’s area and is utilized to identify whether it appears in the shadows or perhaps the highlights.
Shifting your slider toward the left indicates a limited area, while moving it toward the right specifies a larger area.
- Hit OK.
2. Utilize Unsharp Mask To Sharpen
The Unsharp Mask enhances contrast around an image’s edges to make it appear sharper. The Unsharp Mask does not recognize an image’s edges. Instead, it finds pixels with a value different from nearby pixels of the threshold you define.
Following that, it enhances the contrast of nearby pixels by the amount you select. Throughout this way, both lighter and darker pixels for adjacent pixels get brighter and duller, respectively.
Additionally, it provides the radius of both regions in which every pixel gets compared. The size of the edge impacts increases with increasing radius.
The percentage of sharpening any picture is generally a matter of taste. Remember that oversharpening image results in a halo appearance around the edges.
Onscreen, as opposed to in high-resolution output, the Unsharp Mask filter’s effects are more noticeable.
Find the settings that work best for your image by experimenting if printing is your final destination.
- Layer
Picking the layer which includes the picture you wish to sharpen is a possibility whether the picture has numerous layers.
One layer can be applied using Unsharp Mask at such a time, although if layers are connected and combined, the layers can be combined before using the Unsharp Mask filter.
- Unsharp Mask Filter
Select Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask from the menu. Verify that the Preview option is chosen.
Despite having a preview pane, it is a good idea to relocate the Unsharp Mask dialogue box where you can view the filter’s results mostly in the document window.
- Radius
To choose the number of pixels around the edge pixels that have an impact on sharpening, move the Radius slider or input a value. The width of the edge effects increases with increasing radius values. Additionally, the sharpening is more noticeable the wider the edge impacts.
The Radius value changes depending on the topic, the size of the finished reproduction, and the output technique. An ideal Radius value for high-resolution photos is one between 1 and 2. A higher number sharpens a much wider band of pixels, but a smaller value sharpens those edge pixels.
For high-resolution printed images, a 2-pixel radius reflects as a smaller space, so the impact is much less noticeable when compared to screens.
To adjust the amount of pixel contrast, move the Amount slider or input a value. Usually, a quantity between 150% and 200% is advised for high-resolution printed photographs.
- Threshold
Adjust the Threshold slider and enter a value that specifies how apparent these sharpened pixels need to be in the surrounding area to become classified as edge pixels or even sharpened by such a filter.
On a scale from 0 to 255, a threshold of 4 for tonal values, for instance, impacts all pixels with tonal values that differ by 4 or more. As a result, pixels with tonal values 128 and 129 next to each other are unaffected.
Use an edge mask or experiment with Threshold values between 2 and 20 to prevent adding noise or posterization (in photographs with skin tones, for instance).
The standard Threshold value of 0 sharpens each and every pixel in the picture.
3. Selectively Sharpen
If you want to avoid sharpening in specific areas of your image, you can use a mask or a selection. For illustration, in such a portrait, users can apply an edge mask with the Unsharp Mask effect to sharpen their eyes, cheeks, and nose, plus the outline of the head, without affecting the skin’s texture.
Sharpen a selection
- Draw a selection when the picture layer is active in the Layers panel.
- selecting Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. Click OK after making your selections.
- The entire image is left unaltered; only the selection is sharpened.
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4. Making any Image Sharper by Applying an Edge Mask
- To selectively apply sharpness, create a mask. An edge mask can be made in a variety of ways. Use your preferred technique, or attempt this one:
- Choose the channel in the Channels panel that shows the document window’s most contrasted grayscale image. This is frequently the red or green channel.
- The chosen channel should be duplicated.
- Filter > Stylize > Find Edges should be selected while the duplicate channel is active.
- Click Image > Adjustments. To invert an image, use invert.
- Click the filter option of Other > Maximum while keeping the inverted image chosen. Reduce your radius to a low number and click the “ ok ” button to select the pixels or even thicken its edges randomly.
- Selecting Filter > Noise > Median. Select a small radius and then press OK. The surrounding pixels are averaged in this.
- To get rid of errant pixels, choose Image > Adjustment > Levels and increase the black point. If required, you could even use black to continue making any last-edge mask adjustments.
- To feather the edges, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
- To pick the edge mask in the Channels panel, Ctrl-click (on Windows) or Command-click (on Mac OS) the duplicate channel.
- Inside the Layers panel, choose the image layer. Verify that the image still shows the selection.
- Pick Select > Inverse.
- Select the Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask option while the image layer selection is active. Click OK after setting the desired parameters. To display your results, deselect its selection inside the image, then pick the RGB channel inside the Channels window.
5. Include Lens Blur
To create the appearance of a narrower depth of field, blur should be added to an image. This will cause some things to remain in focus while other parts become blurry. To specify exactly how the blur should be created, you may either give a separate alpha channel depth map or make a simple selection of the places you wish to be blurred.
The Lens Blur filter uses the depth map to distinguish the locations of individual pixels in such a photograph. You may also utilize the crosshair cursor to specify the beginning point of a specific blur while a depth map is selected.
To build depth maps, you can use layer masks and alpha channels. In an alpha channel, black areas are treated as being in the foreground of the image, while white areas are treated as being in the background.
Your choice of iris shape will affect how the blur appears. The iris’ form depends on how many blades there are. The blades of an iris can be altered by curving (making them more circular) or spinning them. You can easily enlarge or decrease the preview by using the minus or plus buttons.
- (Optional) Activate Photoshop’s graphics processor. Select Use Graphics Processor in the Preferences box by selecting Edit (Windows) or Photoshop (macOS) > Preferences > Performance.
Lens Blur uses your computer’s graphics card starting with Photoshop 21.0 (released in November 2019), which results in faster performance when using the Lens Blur filters. With Photoshop 21.1 (published in Feb 2020), its Lens Blur technique has indeed been greatly enhanced to provide blurrier edges around objects, brighter bokehs, and much more realistic dazzling highlights.
1. Select Lens Blur under Filter > Blur.
2. Select one of the following choices for Preview:
- Faster: Select this option to create previews more quickly.
- More Accurate: Select this choice to see the finished image. The generation of more accurate previews takes longer.
3. Choose Transparency and Layer Mask with Depth Map first from the Source menu. If you are missing a depth map source channel, choose None.
Note – Users can change the depth of focus by moving this Blur Focal Distance slider. If you set the focus distance to 100, for example, pixels 1 and 255 are entirely blurred, whereas pixels closer to 100 are blurred less. You may adjust its blur focal distance slider that reflects your choice by simply clicking throughout the preview image and focusing on a particular depth.
4. When utilizing a selection as well as an alpha channel as the source of the depth map, choose Invert to flip it.
5. From the Shape menu, pick an iris. Smoothen the iris’s edges with the Blade Curvature slider, or rotate it with the Rotation slider.
6. Drag the Radius slider to increase the blur effect.
7. To select a specific brightness cutoff using specular highlights, move the Threshold slider; any pixels that seem to be brighter than the cutoff value are considered specular highlights.
8. Drag the Brightness slider to make the highlights brighter.
9. Use the Amount slider in the Noise section to add noise to the image. Select either the uniform or gaussian noise distribution.
10. Select Monochromatic to add grey noise without impacting colour.
11. To make the modifications to your image, hit OK.
6. Sharpen Picture Sections
To make edges appear sharper, using Sharpen tool enhances contrast across edges. This sharpening improves as we apply additional paint to a given region.
- Choosing the Sharpen tool (Press and hold the Blur tool if it doesn’t display.)
- Enter the next command inside the settings menu:
- Select a brush tip as well as the blending mode & strength settings.
- To sharpen considering information from across all visible layers, choose Sample All Layers. This tool utilizes the information from the active layer when this option is deselected.
- To improve features as well as reduce pixelated artifacts, choose Protect Detail. If you would like to achieve more pronounced sharpening effects, uncheck this box.
You can sharpen any area of such a picture by dragging it over.
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Last Updated on December 19, 2022 by Apeksha Soni