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Sharpening

Post-Processing

Classic sharpening adds no detail. It hunts for edges and pushes the bright side brighter and the dark side darker, and the eye reads the extra contrast as sharpness. Pushed hard, it turns speckled and artificial. Newer AI sharpeners work differently: they recognize what the subject is and rebuild its edges from knowledge of similar subjects, which goes much further before it breaks.

Related Terms

Upsampling

Enlarging an image beyond its native pixel count. Traditional resampling, as in Photoshop, holds together for roughly a twenty to thirty percent enlargement before problems creep in. AI-driven tools go much further, multiplying the pixel count several times by recognizing subjects and redrawing them from a learned database.