Sharpen a photo

Sharpen crisps fine detail at the scale of your sensor’s pixels. It is separate from Clarity, which works on larger textures and forms.

Sharpen a photo

Open Sharpen in the right column.

Control	Range	Default	What it does
Amount	0 to 100	40	How strongly detail is boosted
Radius	0.5 to 3.0 px	1.0	The size of the detail being sharpened, in pixels of the full-size photo
Masking	0 to 100	30	Limits sharpening to edges; 0 sharpens everything, noise included

Small Radius values crisp fine texture. Larger values thicken edges. Sharpening only shows at 100% zoom or above.

Is it already on?

For a RAW photo, Sharpen starts on at the defaults above, because a RAW file is soft until it is sharpened. For a JPEG or TIFF it starts off, since those files arrive already sharpened. A new local layer starts with Sharpen off.

Click the power button in the section header to switch it on or off. Image › Reset Edits returns a photo to its own starting state: on for a RAW, off for other files.

See what Masking protects

Hold Ctrl while dragging Masking to see the mask itself as a gray image. White is sharpened and black is protected. Let go of Ctrl to return to the photo.

Tip

Raise Masking instead of lowering Amount when sky, skin or shadows turn grainy.

Sharpen part of a photo

Sharpen works on the layer selected in the Layers pane, so a masked layer can sharpen a subject and leave its background alone. See Layers.

Technical details: how it sharpens

Sharpen is an unsharp mask on Oklab lightness only, so hue and saturation are untouched and there is no color fringing. Radius is set in full-resolution pixels and scaled to the preview, so the effect looks the same at any zoom or size. Masking measures the strength of edges on a blurred copy of the photo, so sensor noise does not switch the mask on.

Sharpen runs after Clarity, in linear light, before the display transform. It never clips at white, so bright highlights keep their color.