A Bit of Knowledge: Chose Sharpen or Blur Tool in Photo Editing

It is never too late; you can always fix the image you are not happy with. Today I want to talk about sharpening and blurring tools. If you have an image and it is not as nice and crisp as you anticipated, do not use the Sharpen tool. When I was doing photo restoration years ago, I worked with a lot of customers who asked me to Sharpen their images a bit or remove the backgrounds. Depending on the image quality, sharpening does not always work because it can really digitize the image, and removing a background looks kind of superficial, especially if the object was taken against a busy background. So instead of a sharpening tool, I would use a Blur tool. You're probably saying, "What more blur? No way." Yes, more blur, but what I would do is add blur to the selected background. The reason is that if you add more blur to the background, the contrast difference between the main object and the background is greater, and our eyes then automatically perceive the main object to be sharper.

Now I will lead you through a verbal explanation of how I fixed the Blue Heron photo. When I was taking this photo, the branches were very close to the heron, so I could not get the portrait effect or that nice blurred background in order to emphasize the heron. Therefore, the photo itself looked very busy; as a matter of fact, since I was taking this very fast to make sure I would not lose him, the auto mode focused on the branches behind him, as they appeared sharper. I liked the photo of the heron and I wanted to use it in my postcard to people, so there was a little fixing to do, and here are the steps using Adobe Photoshop, and I am sure that it will be similar for other photo editing software.

[1] Crop the image to the desired size: 400 px by 400 px at 72 dpi.

[2] Duplicate the background photo and create a new layer for reference.

[3] Select the background around the heron and save the background.

[4] Ensure that you are working with duplicates later. Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 1.5 px.

[5] Deselect the background and see if you like the effect; if not, just undo and try a different radius.

[6] Perform the final touches on the image by using curves, colour, and level adjustments. Auto colour and auto level may work well sometimes.


If you are still not happy and think that the main object is not standing out as much as you want, then you can take a few more steps.

[7] Reselect the background or load the selection, and then inverse the selection to select the heron or main object.

[8] Instead of using the sharpening tool, which can be very crude, use the Unsharpen mask instead by going to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharpen Mask, setting Amount to 100%, Radius to 0.4 px, and Threshold to 0. To get the result, I usually play with radius and leave the other two fixed.

Note that the above instructions are for web photos, so the resolution is 72 dpi. For printing, always use 200 dpi or more; therefore, you may want to play around with the suggested settings below to get the best result, as they may not work for the low-resolution photo.

I hope you can use this tip in the future. It may be old news soon as more and more cameras come equipped with technology called face recognition. However, you never know.

'Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.' ~ by Benjamin Spock

~ Anna