Installation

To tell GIMP to parse the smartsharp script when it launches, you must install the script in GIMP's plugin directory with the following command line:

gimptool-2.0 --install-bin smartsharp

The gimptool-2.0 utility is provided by the Debian libgimp2.0-dev package. So that GIMP can understand Perl scripts, you also need to install libgimp2.0 and libgimp-perl.

Significant Order

If you are changing the image in any other way, resizing, or correcting the colors, make sure that sharpening is the last step you perform. Otherwise, the various methods could step on each other's toes and possibly even reverse the sharpening process.

Of course, if an image is badly out of focus, no kind of manipulation is going to make a mega-sharp masterpiece of it; techniques like the tricks I cover here in this article are just patchwork. Out-of-focus images contain less information than sharp images – removing information from an image is easy, but adding information is just about as difficult as getting toothpaste back into the tube.