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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME Taking something that's a little fuzzy and making it sharp is two-thirds magic and one-third science. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Ultra-Sharpen: A dream come true for digital photographersNov. 4, 2001 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, The Post Standard If you have a scanner or digital camera, you probably have a lot of digital photos. If you could improve each one of them with a click of your mouse, you'd do it, right? Then what are you waiting for? There's no gimmick to what I am about to tell you. If you're a Windows user and have Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can make every digital photo in your collection look better without having to learn a single thing about fancy photo editing. The secret is a free Windows program called Ultra-Sharpen. It's a Photoshop plug-in from www.ultrasharpen.com. It's easy to download and simple to install. It won't cost you a cent. Ultra-Sharpen is the safest way I've ever seen of making digital images sharper. Unlike the sharpening menus in standard photo-editing programs, Ultra-Sharpen refuses to sharpen your images too much. You always get just the right amount. (If you've ever tried to do your own sharpening, you probably know that the easiest way to turn Uncle Ben into Count Dracula is to sharpen the picture too much. Digital images that are over-sharpened can look awful if you're not careful.) Ultra-Sharpen is automatic. You just choose it from a menu and it runs. If you want to control some of its actions, you can upgrade to a manual version called Ultra-Sharpen Pro. Ultra-Sharpen is free, but the Pro version is not. The Pro version costs -- are you ready for sticker shock? -- all of $20. Ultra-Sharpen is not a stand-alone program. You must have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, to use it. (An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Photoshop LE worked with Ultra-Sharpen. It will not work with it.) It installs as an automated action and not as a standard plug-in, so you'll probably find that you can't use it with non-Photoshop software. (Many other programs work with standard Photoshop plugins, but Ultra-Sharpen is not an automated action, not a standard plug-in.) Sharpening seems easy to understand. An image that is sharp has clearly defined edges on all objects. In an ideal world in which cameras and scanners were perfect, all images would be perfectly sharp and we would not need software to help us out. (And people like me would have to find other subjects to write about, I suppose.) But lenses don't focus quite right sometimes, scanners don't cooperate the way they should and various editing operations can soften images here and there. As a result, practically every digital image, whether from a digital camera or a scanner, needs to have at least some sharpening. But taking something that's a little fuzzy and making it sharp is two-thirds magic and one-third science. Ultra-Sharpen uses a variation on a method called "unsharp masking," which heightens contrast by creating a second version of the image that's placed over the top of the original slightly off-center. (Digital photo buffs should forgive me for this very simple explanation. I realize there's a lot more to unsharp masking, but we don't need to go into it here.) The main thing about unsharp masking is the fact that it is extremely complicated. The software has to do tricks and the user normally has to make a lot of trial-and-error guesses in the unsharp mask settings to get good results. I don't know about you, but I sure do know about me. I know that I'm not a good guesser when it comes to photo editing software. I've never been satisfied with the way standard programs handle unsharp masking. I've always wondered if I've been doing it right. But those days are over. Ultra-Sharpen takes all the worry out of sharpening pictures. They always look better. Even photos that seemed to look great to start with ended up looking better with a quick touchup from Ultra-Sharpen. That's probably my biggest surprise, and it's something you'll surely find beneficial, too. If you think your images look good now, wait until you see what this magic program can do for them. I also tried Ultra-Sharpen Pro. It's clearly for those who know what they are doing, and I'll admit that I learned quite a bit about manual settings from the Ultra-Sharpen manual. (It's an Adobe PDF file and exceptionally well written.) The Pro version sometimes does a better job than the free version when you use it properly. But it's the free version that impressed me most. All you do is click. You simply can't find an easier way to improve your photos. |