Sharpen your shots with DPP

Sharpening a digital image also increases contrast at the edge of details

- BRIAN WORLEY

Sharpening enhances the contrast of defined edges in a picture. Individual pixels in EOS camera sensors capture only the brightness of a single predetermined colour: red, green or blue. Groups of neighbouring pixels are processed to realize full colour information at each pixel. The resulting images are not as sharp as they would be if captured with separate red, green and blue sensors at each pixel, which is why sharpening is necessary. Despite the name, sharpening cannot fix images that suffer focusing errors, as they lack the details at the edge of the subject.

Canon’s image processing typically adds only a low level of sharpening, which makes its images, JPG and RAW, better suited for post-processing. If you shoot JPG images and use them straight from the card, it is often helpful to increase the in-camera sharpening settings in the Picture Styles.

Early EOS cameras have a single sharpening setting, but more recent models have three separate parameters: strength, fineness and threshold. When processing images in DPP, you can choose a simple sharpening amount or the three parameters in the Unsharp Mask tool.