Intro to Sharpness - With Blur

Today's post talks about sharpness, which I talked about a little bit in my last post. If you want to reference the last post while you read this one, you can open it by clicking here. If you read Tuesday's post about sharpness, you might not really understand how sharpness works because I used simple gradients and swatches to demonstrate it's effect. Today we'll take a quick look into how sharpness affects a photograph as opposed to simple shapes.

Here's the picture I took on my phone for Tuesday's post. If you click on it, it will enlarge and you can get a pretty good idea of some of the detail that's in there. It's really easy to tell that the image is fairly sharp, meaning that it has a decently high intensity of sharpness. Now that you've seen it in its normal state, check out this image below, and notice how it changes when there is a very
low intensity of sharpness.

Yep! That's the full picture. It's the same image as before. Can you tell how it looks much different? This time I've greatly decreased the intensity of the sharpness by applying a field blur to the image. In other words, I made the lightest and the darkest areas of the image have a smooth transition between value levels. The darkest dark is no longer right up against a bright white: there are mid-level values in-between them. Instead of having high intensity contrast, which I showed by using the two swatches right up against each other in Tuesday's post, there is a smooth gradient of all the in-between value levels between the lights and darks.

The difference in the intensity of sharpness can create a lot of visually interesting effects, and it is also related to how our eyes perceive levels of focus. An out-of-focus image will have a low intensity of sharpness, and an image that's in-focus will have a higher intensity of sharpness. I'll talk about this more in next week's post because sharpness is similar, but very different from focus.

On a side note, today is the First Thursday event in Portland, so if you happen to be in the area with some spare time definitely be sure to check out some of the galleries that will be showcasing some great artwork tonight!