Sharper Still!

Tim Parkin

Tim Parkin is a landscape photographer living in Scotland who co-founded On Landscape magazine. Alongside his photography and writing he also co-founded the Natural Landscape Photography Awards, runs a film scanning business and is a judge for other international landscape and nature competitions.

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In my second article on sharpening I’ll steer away from the theoretical and move onto the practical. Ignoring the ‘magic’ of deconvolution sharpening and the legacy of unsharp masking for a moment, lets have a think about what sharpening can actually do to make an image look sharper.

Well, as you saw from the last article, the sharpening effects look for ‘edges’, either lines or spots/dots, and add a little bit of extra lightness on the light side of the edge and a little bit of extra darkness on the dark side.

The variables between most of the sharpening techniques are as follows