How do I disable sharpening

Einsiedler

Hello!

I have one question.

Any time an image is downsampled (to go from your original to SmugMug's large display size, for example), the image loses sharpness. The usual way to restore sharpness is to apply unsharp mask. A typical value, and Photoshop's default, is 50%. By default SmugMug applies only 20% (0.20) because Lanczos does not lose as much sharpness when resizing.

http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93250-what-are-available-display-sizes-?b_id=1644

I have can I disable sharpening of downsampled photos?

A few weeks ago there was "sharpening"-tab in gallery settings, but now I don't see it...

photosbygerry

Hi,

I don't know if this will answer your question, but if you go into the Lr Publishing Manager (on a Apple Mac, right click while hovering over Smugmug in Publish Services) there is now, that is, as of Smugmug Plugin v2.3.2, an Output Sharpening section where you can enable/disable sharpening and specify the output type (eg screen or matte or glossy paper) and the Amount (standard, low or high).

I am not sure, but it would seem the new approach would apply to all images published through the plugin, whereas the old approach allowed for differences by gallery. A few minutes ago I posted a Help request to Smugmug Support asking if this new feature may impact whether or not photos will be triggered for re-publishing (because the sharpening settings on Lr output may have changed). I will respond in here when I get a resolution.

Cheers

rainforest1155

There's no longer a gallery settings sharpening setting available. SmugMug not only offers many different display sizes for each photo, but also creates many additional sizes dynamically on the fly, e.g. for photo tiles used across the site or our different slideshow options. Therefore, we're now handling sharpening automatically for all the lots of different sized versions we create for your photos.

photosbygerry

I received a reply to my query to Help Smugmug which includes the following:

"G'day Gerry,

We recently removed the sharpening gallery options from the site, these were used to sharpen the display copies when an original image was uploaded or replaced. I recently updated the LR plugin to reflect this change in gallery options. I also exposed the "Output Sharpening' options at the Publish Service level, as we had a customer complain about them to being available, when I first developed the plugin I intentionally omitted them, because I thought it would cause confusion having both output sharpening and gallery sharpening. I agree with your comments about which output sharpening option to choose, if you are exporting a photo from LR to disk, you typically know the rendering intent and the output medium, when you are uploading to SmugMug you don't. I would suggest that you leave output sharpening disabled as that is how it has been since I initially wrote the plugin, the display copies will be sharpening using SmugMug's own sharpening settings.

1. I'd suggest leaving Output Sharpening disabled

2. The Output Sharpening options have no bearing on photos being marked for republishing.

3. If you leave Output Sharpening disabled, the sharpening will be the same as it was prior to v2.3.2. If you enable Output Sharpening, obviously the sharpening will be different than it was before.

4. As I mentioned above, I don't think it really makes sense in the context of SmugMug, and would leave it disabled.