SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SELECTIVE SHARPENING OF IMAGES

Selective Sharpening May Involve Sharpening Only Certain Portions Of an Image Or a certain percentage of the pixels of an image while avoiding over-sharpening already sharp areas and the introduction of signal noise in naturally uniform color and/or sharpness areas. A selective sharpening tool may selectively sharpen the image based on a user-indicated sharpening limit. For example, the user may select a particular portion of an image and specify that the least sharp 30% of the pixels in the selected image portion should be sharpened. In response, the selective sharpening tool may determine a sharpness value for each pixel in the image, rank each pixel based on its sharpness value and sharpen only the least sharp 30% of the pixels. Thus, a user may selectively sharpen a certain portion of an image (such as based on percentage of the pixels) while avoiding overly sharpening already sharp areas.