Picasa Tip: What happened to Sharpen?

If you’ve been following the Tips here, you probably use the Sharpen feature of Picasa.  With a single click it makes your digital photos look a lot crisper.  It can’t take an out of focus picture and make it in focus, but it takes that soft look and makes it … sharper.  I use it on all my photos.

Geeks on  Tour Members can watch the Show-Me-How video on sharpen at:
Picasa 3 – Sharpen and Batch Edit
I also wrote an article about why I like sharpen.

Sometime in this past month (May 2009) an update to Picasa changed the way Sharpen works.  They broke it!  Fortunately, they gave us a special ’secret’ command to make it work the way it used to.

The secret?  Hold down the shift key as you click on sharpen.  You’ll see your photo get instantly sharper – just like it always has.  You will then need to click Apply to complete the process. 

So, why did they ‘break’ it?  Here’s the official word from Google employees.  They say that they fixed a problem that it had before and, in the process made it much slower.  Well, most of us never noticed the problem it had before, but we sure notice the ‘much slower’ part now! 

How it works now:
The Sharpen command now has a slider to make it more or less sharp.  The problem is that the slider is *very* non-responsive.  And, even if you slide it all the way to sharpest, we don’t see the results that we used to see.  You only see accurate results if you’re looking at your photo in 100% magnification.  Get to 100% by clicking the 1:1 button in the lower right corner.  But now, of course, you can’t see your whole picture. 

Using the Batch Edit tool to sharpen seems to apply the new effect which is much less noticeable than it use to be.  I find myself using the secret Shift method to sharpen all my photos now.

Google says they’re working on it.

Related posts:

  1. Sharpening Photos with Picasa
  2. Picasa Tip: 4 Clicks to Dramatically Improve your Photos
  3. Picasa Tip: Flipping Photos
  4. Picasa Tip: Scanning Old Photos
  5. Picasa Tip: I'm Feeling Lucky

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Thursday, May 28th, 2009 Edit/Improve Photos, Picasa

6 Comments to Picasa Tip: What happened to Sharpen?

  • Jerry LeRoy says:
    May 28, 2009 at 7:50 am

    Chris, thanks for keeping us up to date on wht’s going on. We haven’t let Picasa update itself recently, just put it off, I guss. We’ll watch for the change and then “shift” into gear!

    Reply to this Comment
  • John Hurley says:
    May 28, 2009 at 8:05 am

    Thanks for the heads up. I do appreciate it. Hopefully we will get together few(remotely) to work some on some of my Picasa issues. What state are you in now? Must be nice traveling around. I live in a condo in New Jersey. John Hurley

    Reply to this Comment
  • Picasa Tip: From Nice to Really Nice Picture | Picasa Tutorials says:
    June 10, 2009 at 6:08 pm

    [...] Sharpen – this is on the effects tab.  Right now you have to hold down on Shift as you click it to see the results.  (See past tip on sharpen)  [...]

    Reply to this Comment
  • Betsy says:
    July 18, 2009 at 10:21 am

    Thank you so much for this post, which I just found while trying to figure out WTF was up with my sharpening on Picasa. I thought it was an issue with my machine, not with the update. So glad to know the truth and the workaround.

    Reply to this Comment
  • Margaret Barnett says:
    December 16, 2009 at 9:47 pm

    Thanks for all the helps. I want to purchase your book, but I have to buy it over the telephone. How can I do that? Can’t find a number.

    Reply to this Comment

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