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Optics, Lenses & Filters

Acutance

The abruptness of the transition at an edge, which the eye reads as sharpness independently of true resolution.

In depth

Resolution is how much detail is present; acutance is how crisply the boundaries between tones are drawn. Unsharp masking works entirely by raising acutance — it invents no new detail, it simply steepens edges. This is why a modestly resolving image with high acutance often looks sharper than a high-resolution image with soft transitions.

Examples in practice

Two prints from the same file, one sharpened and one not, resolve identical detail but the sharpened one looks distinctly crisper.