The order is most of the technique

Name the fault before you open a single dialog

Image quality is not one problem and Photoshop has a different answer for each of its parts. Opening the file and reaching for Sharpen is the default move and it is the wrong one roughly half the time, because sharpening amplifies whatever is already in the picture, including the things you wanted removed.

Look at the image at full size, not fitted to the window, and find a hard edge where something light meets something dark. What you see there tells you which route you are on.

• Soft everywhere, with edges that fade rather than step: focus or motion. Sharpening genuinely helps, and it is the only fault on this list where it is the primary tool.
• Speckled, with colour flecks in the shadows that were not in the scene: noise. This has to be dealt with first, because every sharpening pass makes it worse and no later step will undo that.
• Soft and stepped with no detail anywhere, simply too few pixels: resolution. Nothing is damaged and there is nothing to repair, so this is an enlargement job rather than a quality job.
• Regular squares of flat colour arranged in a grid: compression damage. Sharpening a grid sharpens the grid. This needs the blocks addressed before anything else happens.
• Flat, grey, washed out, nothing wrong with the detail: tone and colour, which is a Camera Raw job and the fastest genuine improvement available on most files.

The sequence, and why each step has to come where it does

This is the whole page in one list. Every item is where it is for a reason, and moving one earlier is the usual cause of a result that looks processed rather than improved.

• Work from the largest, least handled original you have. A file that reached you through a messaging app or a screenshot has been re-encoded, and the re-encoding is damage you are now going to try to repair. Going back one step beats any filter.
• Duplicate the layer, or better, convert it to a Smart Object before you touch a filter. Everything after this becomes reversible, which matters because several of these steps need to be dialled back once you can see the next one.
• Tone and colour first, in Camera Raw. Exposure, contrast, white balance and the shadow and highlight recovery are the steps with the largest visible effect and they change what the later steps are judging.
• Noise reduction second, before any sharpening. This order is not negotiable: sharpening noise turns grain into a permanent texture that the noise tools can no longer distinguish from detail.
• Resample third, if the file needs to be larger. Enlarging after the clean-up means the enlargement is working from repaired pixels rather than scaling up the damage.
• Sharpen last, at the size the image will actually be used. Sharpening is output dependent, so a file sharpened at full size and then shrunk for the web arrives over-sharpened, and one sharpened before enlargement arrives soft.

Camera Raw is where the quality work belongs

Most people reach for the filters in the main Filter menu and never open Camera Raw on a file that is not a raw file. That is the single largest piece of Photoshop left unused, because Camera Raw works on JPEGs and it is a better place to do tone, colour, noise and detail than the equivalent filters are.

Open your file, then Filter and Camera Raw Filter. Everything inside is non-destructive in the sense that matters: the sliders stay live while the dialog is open and you can see the whole set of decisions together rather than committing them one filter at a time.

The Detail panel is the part relevant to quality. Sharpening there carries a masking control, which is the thing the main Sharpen filters make awkward: it restricts the sharpening to edges and leaves flat areas like skin and sky alone, which is exactly where sharpening does visible damage. Noise reduction sits in the same panel, so you can balance the two against each other while watching one preview rather than guessing across two separate dialogs.

The Enhance option is also here, and Super Resolution is the part of it that re-renders the file at a larger pixel dimension rather than interpolating one. It is a different operation from Image Size with resampling turned on, and on a file that is genuinely short of pixels it is the better of the two. It is also the slowest step on this page and it writes a new file rather than a layer.

For a file with several faults, this is the step where you do the most and the step that makes the rest easier. A detail guide on its own will tell you to sharpen. The order is what tells you to come here first.

Sharpening without producing halos

Sharpening does not add detail. It increases the contrast along edges so your eye reads them as crisper, which is why too much of it produces a bright line beside every dark edge. That line is the halo and it is the signature of an over-processed photograph.

Three habits prevent it, and all three are about restraint rather than about which filter you pick.

• Sharpen on its own layer, so the amount can be reduced afterwards with the layer opacity instead of being undone and redone. This is the difference between a decision you can revisit and one you are stuck with.
• Set that layer to the Luminosity blending mode. Sharpening affects colour as well as brightness by default, and the colour component is what produces coloured fringing along edges. Restricting it to brightness removes that without changing anything you wanted.
• Use Smart Sharpen rather than Unsharp Mask where you have the choice, and keep the radius small. A large radius is what creates a wide halo, and the temptation is always to increase it because the effect is more visible at a glance.
• Sharpen in small amounts more than once rather than in one large pass, and judge it at full size. A sharpening setting that looks right on a fitted-to-window preview is almost always too strong.
• Mask it. Either the masking slider in Camera Raw or a layer mask painted over the areas you want left alone. Skin, sky and any flat background gain nothing from sharpening and show its side effects first.

Resampling, and what Photoshop can honestly add

Image Size with Resample ticked is where people go to make a file bigger, and it is worth being clear about what it does. It interpolates: it invents new pixels by reading the ones around them. The resampling methods differ in how they guess, and Preserve Details is the one built for enlargement rather than for reduction, so it is the right choice in that dialog.

What none of them do is recover information. An enlarged file holds more pixels and the same amount of actual detail, spread further apart. That is useful, because printing and display both want pixels, and it is not the same as the picture getting better.

There is a separate trap in the same dialog. Unticking Resample and changing the resolution figure does not touch a single pixel: it only changes the physical size the file claims when printed. That is occasionally exactly what you need, and it is frequently mistaken for a quality improvement because the number went up.

The resolution guide on this site covers where enlargement genuinely stops helping, and it is the better page to read if making the file bigger is the actual goal rather than making it cleaner.

What this route costs, and when an app is the right answer

Everything above is a sequence of judgements. How much noise reduction before the skin goes plastic, how much sharpening before the halo appears, whether this file wants Super Resolution or Preserve Details. Photoshop is good precisely because it hands you every one of those decisions, selectively and reversibly, and you can mask any of them to one part of the frame.

That is also the cost. Each decision takes attention, the good result depends on your judgement rather than on the software, and the whole sequence has to be repeated on the next file. For one photograph that matters, this is time well spent and the ceiling is higher than any automatic tool reaches. For a folder of forty, it is an afternoon.

Unblur Photo makes those decisions for you in one pass, which is the trade stated plainly: you get no masking, no per-stage control and no opportunity to dial the sharpening back, and you get the result without making six judgements. It is built for faces going soft, files too small, pictures flat or faded, and black and white that wants colour, and it is the wrong tool whenever the fix needs to apply to one part of the frame and not another.

If you are not yet sure which fault you have, the photo quality guide sorts them before you commit to a route. The unblur guide covers the specific case where sharpening is the primary tool, and the enhancer comparison covers what the different categories of tool are actually built to do.

More guides

• how to improve photo quality
• how to increase image resolution
• how to unblur a picture
• how to unpixelate an image
• photo enhancer apps

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