What do we do when we gets things wrong at the taking stage of our photography and an image just isn't sharp? Throw it away? Sometimes, but before you do, give the image a little thought as there are some other options. It's true you can't make a wildly unsharp image sharp with even the best tools in your software, but some techniques are worth pursuing.

Purchasers of the CD will find the original files in the goodies folder entitled dragon.jpg

Step 1. Call up the dragon above and open your layers palette via the F7 key. You will notice how camera shake has made the image very soft. Drag the thumbnail twice over the copy icon, which is the centre one at the bottom of the layers palette and make three identical layers as shown below.

Select the bottom layer of the stack and choose Filter-Stylize-Find edges.

After the filter has completed (shown above) select the layer above it and choose hard light from the blending modes within the layers palette as demonstrated below.

This has given the image an arty pearl look and appears to have sharpened it up quite a bit. However, the image is a bit bright after that manipulation and you can deal with that by selecting the bottom thumbnail again and calling up the levels command via the shortcut keys Ctrl+L. Move the centre slider to the right while looking at the image to darken it down.

You can now merge just the bottom two layers into one via the shortcut keys Shift+Ctrl+E, merge visible.

Already the image is far more acceptable than what you started with, but the background is a bit fussy and we will replace that using a slightly different method to the previous projects.

Step 2. Make a new blank layer by clicking the centre icon as the bottom of the layers palette and drag that beneath your dragon. (Leaving the original turned off, but still on top of the stack)

Using the eye dropper tool select two shades of blue from within the image and we have demonstrated that below.

Touching down with the mouse will select your foreground colour and holding down the Alt key and sampling again will select your background.

Select Filter-Render-Clouds to give a nice cloud type effect using your two chosen colours. Add about 8 pixels of monochrome noise to your background also from the filter menu. You can fine tune the background colour using the hue and saturation palette (Ctrl+U), which often works very well.

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Step 3. We have already covered the technique of making a transparency, but there are other ways to achieve the same results. Select your middle layer, the dragons head and apply a layer mask by clicking the icon at the bottom left of the palette. Enlarge your image, select the airbrush tool along with a small soft edged brush and black as your colour. You can now mask out the background of the dragon freehand if you have a steady hand. You can make the brush larger for masking the bulk of the background and smaller around the edges.

Tip. When your image is greatly enlarged the easiest way to navigate around it is by holding the space bar down and moving your image with the hand tool that appears. As you release the space bar the airbrush tool will return for use.

If your freehand is not too good, mask around the edge in small steps while holding the shift key down. Although you are masking in straight lines, if you have the image enlarged enough the end result will be fine as shown below.

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Step 4. You just need a couple of final touches to complete this project. You can now delete the original thumbnail that we kept in the layer stack. In this instance you did not need it, but the practice of keeping an original in your layers stack is a good one to follow. Some manipulations can destroy small details in your pictures, but with an original remaining in the stack you will always have the chance using a layer mask to put back detail that may be lost.

Using the gradation tool shown below you can create some darkening to the edge of your background as we did with the gold leaf.

Finally add about +20 saturation to the dragon from the hue and saturation palette via Ctrl+U for a bit more punch.

You will see when you compare the final image with the original that the effect has changed the original soft image completely.