The second edition of this book was further developed to help me and other photographers on how to successfully sharpen their photographs for publishing a POD book, such as a Blurb book. It was developed specifically for a digital/laser half-tone printing processes by the HP Indigo 5000. The books is also applicable to the Xerox iGen3 printer.



Photographic image files need to be sharpened when converting them (Photoshop .psd) to a JPEG (.jpg), but until now, it was hit or miss process. This book is an expansion on the two step sharpening process advocated by the late Bruce Fraser, the recognized guru of photographic sharpening methods.



This book is focused on using the Photoshop (CS3) UnSharp Mask (USM) to create the clearly defined and detailed photographs that are needed for a successfully printing by the POD publishing process. If a photographer does not compensate during the image preparation process to upload an image into BookSmart, or other POD book template, they will probably be disappointed in the resulting halftone printed book. The resulting photographs will appear slightly soft with a slight loss of contrast.



This book has over 100 examples of sharpened images of various USM settings of Amount, Radius and Threshold. These examples help you understand the relationship necessary for proper photographic image sharpening.



The examples were made from two different types of photographs. One set of sharpen examples is from a color negative film that was scanned and other set of examples are from a Digital Camera.