Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2

Book excerpt: It's a sad but undeniable fact of life: Whether you scan, shoot, or capture, the process of digitizing images introduces softness, and to get great-looking results, you'll need to sharpen the great majority of digital images. The softness introduced during digitizing results from the very nature of the digitizing process. To represent images digitally, we must transform them from continuous gradations of tone and color to points on a grid. In the process details gets "averaged" into the pixels, softening the overall appearance. For some types of printed output, further softness is introduced when the image pixels are converted to dots of ink or toner. As a result, just about every digital image requires sharpening. But another sad fact of digital photography is that most images are sharpened badly--either not enough, too much, or using the wrong methods--creating chunky details and harsh edges. Author, Bruce Fraser is here to teach readers all they need to know about sharpening including when to use it, why it's needed, how to use the camera's features, how to recognize an image needs sharpening, how much to use, what's bad sharpening and how to fix over sharpening. For more on Sharpening: http: //www.creativepro.com/story/feature/11242.html