Smart Sharpen Photoshop plug-in

About

The plug-in is a sophisticated sharpening tool that works where sharpening is required the most - the edges. It automatically creates the detail mask where sharpening will be applied and the user has the ability to add or remove the detail from the mask. Then, multi-level sharpening is applied to the image.

Features

Live preview of the final image
Ability to save and load settings
Ability to add and remove detail in the mask
Multiple levels of sharpening
Full featured demo available

Technical details

Product supports both 8 and 16 bit RGB images
Photoshop 6 and up or Elements required
PC version available

In action

Here's the 100% crop of the image we wish to sharpen.

If we zoom a little we will see that the image contains a certain amount noise:

Running an Unsharp Mask filter (USM) will only make this noise worse:

USM settings used:

We need a way of sharpening the detail, while not increasing the amount of noise. That's where Smart Sharpen comes in handy. Let's start the plug-in:

and click on the 'Mask' view. This is our mask. The white areas will be affected by the sharpening, while black areas will not.

Moving the 'Mask' slider down will reduce the amount of detail in the mask.

While moving the slider up will increase the amount of detail:

The idea is to create the mask that has all of the important detail while excluding the featureless area of the image. This seems good:

Now, click on the 'Result' view and adjust the amount of sharpening to your liking. Remember, there is no general rule of how much sharpening you need:

And the result:

To really appreciate the the difference between the USM filter and the Smart Sharpen let's zoom in a little. The difference is even more evident in print.

Unsharp Mask Smart Sharpen

Go to the Store to purchase.