Unsharp Mask

CG
Posted By
Carla_Griffin
Jun 21, 2004
Views
159
Replies
5
Status
Closed
Hello all:

I have several elements books and have searched far and wide and experimented on several pictures and I cannot seem to grasp the concept of this unsharp mask thing. I don’t see the difference in my pics. I don’t know what I am looking for or even if it is correctly applied. Please help me. If anyone knows a good link to a tutorial with images I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
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O
OldnSenile
Jun 21, 2004
Carla, have you seen this:

http://www.scantips.com/simple6.html
JB
John_Burnett_(JNB)
Jun 21, 2004
If you give us a few more details as to the process and parameters you are using, we might be able to suggest some alternatives.

USM should be applied as pretty much the very last thing you do. If you are going to print, you’ll probably apply USM to the full-size file, but remember to scale your on-screen view to 100% to see the effect. If you are going to display the picture on the web, resize it first (to 800 x 600, for example), rescale the view to 100%, then apply USM.
CG
Carla_Griffin
Jun 21, 2004
Thanks oldnsenile for the link. That is helpful. John it is hard to explain without being able to post the picture. I wish we could on here. I hasve used for example a settng of 150, 1.0, and i now as you suggested viewing at 100% I do see a difference. I just don’t know if it is a good change or not. I think i just may not have a photo eye:(
RH
ronald_hands
Jun 21, 2004
Unsharp mask started to make sense to me when I realized that the little preview window in the Unsharp Mask dialog box (with the three sliders) is showing a portion of the image at 100% *and* that if I held down the left mouse button while the hand tool was in that 100% image I was seeing the "non-sharpened" image. As soon as I released the mouse button, the sharpening effect was evident. It was easy to play around with settings and then check the results by this "mouse down/mouse up" technique.

It’s important to have the image at 100%, either in that preview window or by changing the View menu setting for the whole picture if you want to see what unsharp mask is really going to do.

OR so I believe.

I don’t have a color printer so I send out any prints I want made. So far, the true photo print results have always been an exact match for what I see in the Unsharp Mask preview window.
RF
Robert_F_Carruth
Jun 21, 2004
Carla,

A good way to compare results is to apply unsharp mask to a duplicate layer. Then by alternately turning off and on the visibility of that layer you can view a before and after of the whole picture at once. I’ve found that if I don’t examine everything I can sometimes get what I want in parts of the image but completely ruin sky or water or foliage with the same setting. In that case I select portions and apply different settings to each.

Bob

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