Basic Sharpening

After you’ve color corrected your photos and right before you save your files, you’ll definitely want to sharpen them. I sharpen every digital camera photo I take, either to help bring back some of the original crispness that gets lost during the correction process, or to help fix a photo that’s slightly out of focus. Either way, I haven’t met a digital camera (or scanned) photo that didn’t need a little sharpening. Here’s a basic technique for sharpening the entire photo:

Step One:

Open the photo that you want to sharpen. Because Elements displays your photo in different ways at different magnifications, choosing the right magnification (also called the zoom amount) for sharpening is critical. Because today’s digital cameras produce such large-sized files, it’s now pretty much generally accepted that the proper magnification to view your photos during sharpening is 50%. If you look up in your image window’s title bar, or down in the bottom-left corner of the window, it displays the current percentage of zoom (shown circled here in red). The quickest way to get to a 50% magnification is to press Ctrl-+ (plus sign; Mac: Command-+) or Ctrl-– (minus sign; Mac: Command-–) to zoom the magnification in or out.