IMAGENER UNLIMITED The World's Only Raster to
Vector Enlargement Technology
See your pictures
with amazing detail
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IMAGENER UNLIMITED The World's Only Raster to Vector Enlargement Technology |
Photo Enlargement Software See your pictures with amazing detail |
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Unsharp Mask DefinitionHow to Sharpen Any PhotoWe as humans have a tendency to see photos as somewhat "soft" or out-of-focus. You would think scanning photos at a very high resolution should sharpen our perception, but that's not the case. All images need moderate sharpening, even those from the highest quality digital cameras or those scanned on the highest resolution scanners. This fact is well known in the printing and graphics arts industries. These industries have vastly improved image sharpening over the years. Think about it for a moment; old photos and movies were much 'blurrier' than those we enjoy today. "Unsharp masking" is the term developed to describe a technique that printers and graphic artists use to sharpen images by emphasizing differences between adjoining areas having significantly different hue or tone. Unsharp Mask almost always can improve the visual quality of photos and digital images. When Unsharp Mask is applied to images there is an increase in the degree of contrast at the boundaries of places in the image where significant content changes. These places are called tone shifts. Tone shifts have varying degrees of strength themselves depending on whether the content is gradually changing from one result to another, or whether the content change is abrupt. Applying an Unsharp Mask operation to the most highly detailed areas of an image increases picture sharpness and visual optimization. Sophisticated photo manipulation products like Photoshop® or Paint Shop Pro® have Unsharp Mask functions built into them, but these products are often expensive and/or difficult to learn. A photo enlargement software product called Imagener - www.imagener.com - has the Unsharp Mask function built into the interface. Regardless of the tool you use, there are always three settings for the Unsharp Mask function; Amount, Radius and Threshold. Amount refers to the intensity of the Unsharp Mask effect. A setting between 100% and 200% will do, depending on the Radius. The bigger the Radius, the less Amount needed. One "standard" Amount setting to start with is 120% however, some images need more than this, others less. Radius refers to the dimension, in width, of every sample that will be affected. Choose a setting between 1 and 1.5, depending on the resolution of the image. The higher the resolution of the image, the greater the setting should be for Radius. Complex images will look better with different settings than images with simpler content. For example, try a Radius setting of 1 for a 200 dpi (dots per inch) image and a Radius settign of 1.5 for a 300 dpi image. Again the more Amount you use, the less Radius is necessary. Threshold specifies how many numbers of samples in an image will be sharpened. A setting of 0 will affect every sample, whereas a setting of 50 will affect almost none of the samples. Highly detailed images such as line art require a setting of 3; whereas portraits look best with a setting of 5 to 9 (try to keep minor wrinkles down to a minimum). It takes practice to come up with the right combination of settings for an image, but all images will look better with Unsharp Mask applied.
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