The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers
Step One: Go under the Filter menu, under Sharpen, and choose Smart Sharpen. This filter is in Basic mode by default, so there are only two sliders: Amount controls the amount of sharpening (I know, “duh!”) and Radius determines how many pixels the sharpening will affect. The default Amount setting of 100% seems too high to me for everyday use, so I usually find myself lowering it to between 60% and 70%. The Radius is set at 1 by default, and I rarely change that, but for this image, I raised it to 2.
Step Two: Below the Radius slider is the Remove pop-up menu (shown here), which lists the three types of blurs you can reduce. Gaussian Blur (the default) applies the same sharpening you get using the regular Unsharp Mask filter. Motion Blur is useless, unless you can accurately determine the angle of blur in your image (which I’ve yet to be able to do even once). The third one is the one I recommend: Lens Blur. This uses a sharpening algorithm created by Adobe’s engineers that’s better at detecting edges, so it creates fewer color halos than you’d get with the other choices, and overall I think it gives you better sharpening for most images.
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Chapter 10
Sharpening Techniques
SCOTT KELBY
When to Use the Smart Sharpen Filter Instead
Although it hasn’t caught on like many of us hoped, the Smart Sharpen filter offers some of the most advanced sharpening available in Photoshop CS6 (along with the improved Sharpen tool), because within it is a special sharpening algorithm that’s better than the one found in the ever popular Unsharp Mask filter— you just have to know where to turn it on. Because Unsharp Mask is still so popular (old habits are hard to break), I find that I generally switch to Smart Sharpen when I run into a photo that’s just a little soft (maybe I moved a bit when taking the shot, so it’s not really sharp right out of the camera).