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Sharpening

The sharpening pane contains the controls to add an Unsharp Mask style sharpening similar to what Photoshop provides. Using the Sharpening controls can save you the step of adding additional Sharpening before printing and can help compensate for loss of sharpness due to dot gain from your printer. Sharpening should only be applied at the end of your workflow just before printing. If you plan to do additional retouching or compositing work after resizing your image you should disable the Sharpening controls.

To sharpen your image for output use these steps after you have adjusted the Document Size pane controls.

Zoom in on your image to 1:1. You can do this easily by using the 1:1 Zoom preset located in the Navigator pane.

Enable the Sharpening controls by toggling the on/off control in the Sharpening pane title bar.

If your original image was sharp, start by setting the Radius slider to 1 or 2. If your original image was not sharp, try a higher setting of 2 to 4.

Set the Threshold slider to zero (0)

Adjust the Amount slider up in increments of 25 until the image in the preview looks slightly oversharp. You can tell this when the image begins to look artificial or artifacts along edges start to appear. Settings of 75 to 150 are typical.

Now adjust the Threshold slider up to reduce the sharpening effect and artifacts. A setting of 4 to 10 is usual. You can toggle the sharpening controls on and off to help preview the effects of the sharpening only.

Sharpening Off

Sharpening On

Tip: Keep in mind that this sharpening is applied to the entire image area. If you wish to use selective sharpening or a third party sharpening tool like Nik Sharpener you should disable the Sharpening controls in Genuine Fractals.