How do you sharpen photos?
rookieshooter
Registered Users Posts: 539 Major grins
I'm curious how to sharpen in PS. I typically just use JPEG which does not need sharpening, but want to play around with RAW and sharpening to see the difference.
If you could post your preferred sharpening technique I would appreciate it.
If you could post your preferred sharpening technique I would appreciate it.
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then hone it with a diamond tipped steel to take the burrs off
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Sharpening is my very last part of my workflow....prior to saving as.............
so I do all of my PS work (staring in lightroom) and then I go to filters page down to Sharpen then clik on UNSHARP MASK ......and slowly do my sharpening and watching the preview to make sure everything looks normal...no halos and such.......then I back off a notch or two and then save as a #12 jpeg.......
Move a slider.
The jpgs your camera pops out so quickly, have already had this digital sharpening performed by your camera according to the built in but limited parameters chosen in your camera's set up menu.
Image Sharpening, of RAW images, is a complicated undertaking with conflicting goals of enhancing portions of the image, and at the same time trying to avoid enhancing other aspects of the image and avoiding increasing image noise which is inherent in sharpening if not done carefully. There are whole books written on the subject which you might want to explore. One book you might like to start with is "Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera RAw, and Lightroom2 - 2nd edition" by Bruce Fraser and Jeffe Schewe
All digital Raw images will need capture sharpening, as the very act of digitizing an image ( converting an analog image on a silicon sensor to digital data ) results in some loss of image sharpness. Digital sharpening consists of "haloes that everybody sees, but NOBODY notices" to quote Eric Chan, the Adobe engineer who worked on the sharpening module in Lightroom 3/ACR 6.1
One simple way is to use the presets available in the Preset Panel in Lightroom3 which include Portrait and Landscape. There are different presets because faces and landscapes require different settings for good results with smooth skin and sharp eyes, versus the fine detail in leaves and grass in landscapes. You can then adjust the settings chosen in the Preset to begin to get a feel for what they do.
Currently in Adobe Camera Raw v6.1 or Lightroom 3, sharpening is incorporated first in the RAW conversion engine, with four sliders - Amount, Radius, Detail, and Masking. You must zoom into your image to 100% to see what is happening as you adjust the sharpening sliders. If you hold down the alt/option key as you adjust the slider with your mouse ( and you are viewing at 100%) the image turns to B&W so you can see precisely what is happening to the edges of your images, as you make adjustments. It turns B&W because you are going to affect only the luminance values, not the color values of the image without having to convert to the LAB color space like rutt suggested in his tutorial.
Amount is like amount in Unsharp Mask and can vary from 20-30% to 70-90% usually, and rarely more than 150% (Increasing amounts will increase image noise, and that is why the Noise Reduction dialogue box is part of the Sharpening panel as well. ) The Default value of AMount is 25%. And 0% means zero sharpening.
Radius has a default value of 1.0, and I rarely move it beyond the range of 0.8 to 1.2, and usually leave it at 1.0 for standard DSLR Raw files - increasing the radius enlarges the area on each side of the line that the contrast is enhanced, and hence the halos which one wants to avoid as much as possible. Radius will vary some by file size, if the files are very large or small, but for standard DSLR Raw files, 1.0 works pretty well.
The Detail slider helps suppress the halos crated with sharpening, with a setting of 0 resulting in the most suppression of halos, and 100 applies no suppression at all. With the Detail slider at 100, the sharpening approaches that done by Unsharp Mask. I rarely change this much from 25, but do raise it slightly if more sharpening is needed.
The Masking slider, if the image is viewed at 100% with the alt/option key held down while sliding the masking slider, will display a black and white image that represents the mask that is applied to limit here the sharpening is going to be applied to the image. All areas in the mask that are black will not be sharpened at all, and all white areas will get the fulll sharpening effect. Grey areas will get intermediate values of sharpening. I make great use of the Masking slider to limit my sharpening to only those areas I want the sharpening accentuated, and to avoid sharpening areas like skies, skin tones, etc. My Masking values may vary from very little to 80 or 90 as I watch the image at 100% with the alt/option key held down.
If I perform sharpening within Photoshop itself, I always do it on a copy of the background layer, so that I can use a mask or the Opacity slider to limit/control its effects on the image.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
Personally, I like the video and PDF tutorials available from TLR:
http://www.thelightsright.com/sharpeningyourphotographs
I also like and use some of the TLR actions/scripts/panels, in particular:
http://www.thelightsright.com/TLRProfessionalSharpeningToolkit
It's a moderately huge topic so be prepared to invest a significant amount of time learning this stuff. I probably spent close on 100 hours over 3 months really getting to grips with the topic. Having said that, I didn't find it a burden -- thoroughly enjoyed the process in fact.
Nearly all of the materials I have seen are totally Photoshop centric (and not easily transposed for other applications).
"Real World Image Sharpening" by the late Bruce Fraser is a little dated but still considered a definitive text so you may want to track down a copy of that too.
I also like the Deke McClelland series at Lynda.com:
http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=543
Study all of that and you'll be in good shape ;-)
I tend to do this a little heavy handed and rarely do any whole image sharpening after that. Local tonal contrast enhancement via NIK's Color Efex Pro plugin works for me in lieu of conventional sharpening techniques.
http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/20357.html
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
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They look good to me on my monitor.
Remember that sharpening for prints ( output ) is different than sharpening for the web, too.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
OK, I've been reading this for years, and no-one ever bothers to say why, or how to do it differently. WHY?!? HOW?!? YES! I'M SHOUTING!
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
Read the Fraser article (link above). Its all explained,
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.