Help understanding the sharpening settings

jdorseydesign

Hi, quick question and hopefully some clarification.

The sharpening settings do not affect prints sent to Bay Photo do they? They are only for on-screen viewing right? The reason I ask is, I just ordered some prints from Bay from one of my galleries and they were softer than I expected (I also printed some at Walgreens, because I wanted to see for myself the quality difference) and while the color reproduction was better on the Bay prints, they were significantly softer. I also noticed the publish to smugmug feature in Lightroom 3 lacks any output sharpening, while the publish to hard drive (which is what I used for the Walgreens prints) does have output sharpening.

I just want to clarify... I DO need to do some sharpening before I upload my prints to smugmug in order to have them sharp when printed?

jfriend

jdorseydesign wrote: »

I just want to clarify... I DO need to do some sharpening before I upload my prints to smugmug in order to have them sharp when printed?

Yes, if you are printing via Smugmug, you should sharpen your originals for printing before uploading them to Smugmug. Your originals are sent to Bay for printing untouched. They will not be sharpened before printing. A consumer lab like Walgreens probably does add sharpening before printing. Bay Photos is considered a "pro" lab so they assume that you've already prepared your image for printing the way you want it (unless you ask them to do manual color correction).

The sharpening settings in the gallery settings are ONLY for the creation of web copies. Smugmug resizes your original and then applies some sharpening (which is needed to compensate for the resize operation) according to those settings. I have never in my life adjusted those sharpening settings in the gallery settings, but they are there for some people who think they want more or less sharpening on their web-generated sizes.

jdorseydesign

jfriend wrote: »

Yes, if you are printing via Smugmug, you should sharpen your originals for printing before uploading them to Smugmug. Your originals are sent to Bay for printing untouched. They will not be sharpened before printing. A consumer lab like Walgreens probably does add sharpening before printing. Bay Photos is considered a "pro" lab so they assume that you've already prepared your image for printing the way you want it (unless you ask them to do manual color correction).

The sharpening settings in the gallery settings are ONLY for the creation of web copies. Smugmug resizes your original and then applies some sharpening (which is needed to compensate for the resize operation) according to those settings. I have never in my life adjusted those sharpening settings in the gallery settings, but they are there for some people who think they want more or less sharpening on their web-generated sizes.

Cool thanks, now I just wish the smugmug publish feature in Lightroom 3 had output sharpening I guess I can just add it in the develop module... it's non destructive after all.

jfriend

jdorseydesign wrote: »

Cool thanks, now I just wish the smugmug publish feature in Lightroom 3 had output sharpening I guess I can just add it in the develop module... it's non destructive after all.

I think I saw somewhere that the author of the plug-in realizes that the output sharpening option is missing and he will add it in a future version.