Any real, practical difference here?

mercphoto

These are 100% crops of an image done two different ways and I'm trying to decide if there is any real difference or not. This part of the image would be 2" on a side and part of a 10" square image overall. I'm actually getting test prints of each to see how it actually looks on paper.

The way image A was created is a simple process that I'd love to use. Image B was replicated with a more involved process that I'd like to avoid. The cynic in me says Image A is not as good but I'm not an unbiased observer. Is there a difference? If so, is it enough to worry about? The really odd thing -- on the screen they look much larger than the 2" they would be on paper.

Thanks with any thoughts.

Image A:


Image B:

Zerodog

I'm sorry man, I swear B looks better on this monitor. You need to print them so you can see if you can tell for the finished product.

Sand

I see a little more contrast in "A" than in "B". Look at the darker green area (weeds?) over the driver's head and in the reflections on either side of the driver's door of the car. They are just a little tiny wee bit more distinct/visable in "A". Other than that I don't see any significant differences.

rich56k

my .02
B looks noticeably sharper...the helmet, the backend and side of the car, the back wheel...not sure if you just sharpened in PS or what.

It sounds like your saying neither image is the original?

With your proven skills shooting cars, karts, etc. in motion I'm not getting why any post is needed (?) however it's been a long day for me - I may be just missing the obvious ??!!

If my only choice was A or B I'd go with B. Although what end result are you after? what does the client expect?

-Rich

puzzledpaul

B looks sharper to me too, but the 'pin stripe' across the door (on appears to have a slight case of the 'jaggies' - which A doesn't.

pp

Glort

B looks asharper to me but I'd have to wonder if when printed it is ovesharpened and gets some artifacts in it?
Generally for my setup, an image at 100% is going to look more like A to be correctly sharpened in print. Of course there is also the factor of what paper your actualy printing on as different surfaces produce different apparent sharpness and contrast.

mercphoto

Thanks guys. I should know if 4-5 hours what the printed result looks like. So here's the scoop, here is what I'm doing. I'm trying to get a flow down for doing photo books. My page layouts are pretty simple, nothing complicated, so I've found that designing a book from within Aperture is more than adequate for my needs. I have a custom 10x10" book theme, I've made my own master page layouts, and I just drag and drop photos onto master pages. Very simple. Much easier than exporting a bunch of JPGs, doing pages one by one within Photoshop, etc. The only real problem is getting the pages out of Aperture. You can't directly export a page as a JPG. You have to print the book, printing to PDF, and use an Automator PDF Services script to convert the PDF pages to JPG pages. I have a script from the Apple Developer Forums that does just that.

But I've got this concern about that process, and image A is a crop of a 2" square from within the 10" page to show that concern. I replicated the page layout entirely in Photoshop and made the same 2" square crop, and that is image B. I think what is happening is that Photoshop re-sizes differently than Aperture does. That Miata is a 2" by 3" inset photo on the main page. As a result that big full-res 10 megapixel file needs to be re-interpolated to just under 1MP and I think that resizing is accounting for the difference.

Whether it matters or not on the printed page I'll know in a few hours. I like this flow, staying completely within Aperture, because its so much simpler. If I was doing complicated page layouts I'd have to export anyway. But for simple books its a great workflow.

Gringriff

On screen here I agree with the others that B looks sharper. Let us know how the prints compare.

dbveto

I can see the difference in sharpness the best when I look at the drivers face.
B looks sharper

mercphoto

No difference whatsoever on paper. That area is just too small to show any real difference that shows up on screen. Good to know!

zoomer

B looks a smidge sharper.
If b was not there to compare it against then a would look fine.