Sharpen and unsharp mask for bored designers

P.S.: Everybody love these letters!

Hi there, fellow designer. Running is boring and walking is extremely time consuming. What should bored designer suffering time shortage do in such circumstances, you may ask. Of course he or she should sharpen stuff.

Looks like you’ve done great job planning and designing another website layout and it’s final outfit. Your mighty developer friends are working hard cutting your pixel perfect templates in beautiful pngs. And then you find out that your beloved client childishly provided low resolution, bloody small and blurry as hell images for, let’s say, team page. Set of, speaking truthfully, shitty company leaders portraits.

...your beloved client childishly provided low resolution, bloody small and blurry as hell images...

Imagined? Yeah, it’s a pity, that client ruins your design this way. Sure there is no universal cure here and extremely bad images will still be bad and even can transform to a nightmare in spite of all your efforts but you still can try.

Here are your options. You can apply sharpen filter, unsharp mask and a combination of other/high pass filter and blending modes.

• First option seems nice if your target image is free of jpeg artifacts due to sharpening will affect entire image, including areas you’d better don’t show anyone.
• Second option is much better because it’s not so destructive nature -- it increases low scale acutance of predefined in radius value amount of nearby pixels. It won’t add new details, just increase contrast of this neighbors.
• Third option is just a hand crafted variant of unsharp mask, but playing with it’s values you can achieve both sharpen and unsharp mask results.

So, now it’s not exactly that boring to take off for some running, isn’t it? See you soon, dear designer.

...there is always one more option -- hire freelancer or contractor...

By the way, there is always one more option -- hire freelancer or contractor. You might think that creativity is your field and you don’t want to put your hands deep in this nerdy mess. There are always lots of guys who know how to do messy stuff and eager to help.