For those that shoot in RAW

Maestro

I am relatively knew to shooting in RAW. At this point I mostly use it to correct the exposure and sometimes I warm or cool down the "temperature" of the shot, but not much else. I have been doing a lot of bird shooting lately. I use, primarily, a 100-400mm lens mostly at 400mm when shooting. Anyhow, even with that reach, I find myself zooming and cropping in Photoshop but the picture then loses some sharpness. In the RAW software with Photoshop I have noticed that there is a pixel per inch setting. Will raising the pixel per inch setting allow my cropped pictures to stay sharper? I realize the photo won't maintain its original sharpness but I would like some more sharpness in my photos. The Photoshop RAW software defaults to 300 pixels per inch. What is the setting you work with?

Thanks in advance.

maxima302

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but no: the DPI will not influence sharpening. Also I would not sharpen in ACR, but rather sharpen as the last step in your workflow.

colourbox

The size setting in Camera Raw is almost the same as using Image Size in Photoshop itself. It's only there for convenience. Making up more pixels won't improve sharpening.

The pixels per inch setting is about potential detail, not actual sharpening amount. It comes from the absolute number of pixels you have, and what their final density (resolution) is after you size those pixels to the final output size. In other words, you can't know how much to sharpen or what dpi you need until you know what your output specs are.

Say for example you shoot with a Canon Rebel Xti, image dimensions 3888 x 2592 pixels. Then you need to crop out a bunch and you end up with, say, 2400x1800. Then you print at 8x10 inches wide, or 10x8. 2400 pixels wide divided by 10 inches wide = 240 pixels per inch. If you printed 5x4, you would have 480 pixels per inch available. That is how much potential detail you have. If you go online, you can't use all those pixels. You might resample to 600x400 pixels (actual ppi depends on monitor it is viewed on), yet it might still look very sharp.

To get at that potential detail you need good sharpening technique. You probably want to study sharpening techniques in the dgrin tutorials. Or this article.

Maestro

colourbox wrote:

The size setting in Camera Raw is almost the same as using Image Size in Photoshop itself. It's only there for convenience. Making up more pixels won't improve sharpening.

The pixels per inch setting is about potential detail, not actual sharpening amount. It comes from the absolute number of pixels you have, and what their final density (resolution) is after you size those pixels to the final output size. In other words, you can't know how much to sharpen or what dpi you need until you know what your output specs are.

Say for example you shoot with a Canon Rebel Xti, image dimensions 3888 x 2592 pixels. Then you need to crop out a bunch and you end up with, say, 2400x1800. Then you print at 8x10 inches wide, or 10x8. 2400 pixels wide divided by 10 inches wide = 240 pixels per inch. If you printed 5x4, you would have 480 pixels per inch available. That is how much potential detail you have. If you go online, you can't use all those pixels. You might resample to 600x400 pixels (actual ppi depends on monitor it is viewed on), yet it might still look very sharp.

To get at that potential detail you need good sharpening technique. You probably want to study sharpening techniques in the dgrin tutorials. Or this article.

Thanks Colourbox. I will check out those tutorials.

Maestro

maxima302 wrote:

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but no: the DPI will not influence sharpening. Also I would not sharpen in ACR, but rather sharpen as the last step in your workflow.

Thanks Mark. I usually do whatever kind of sharpening I do in Photoshop with unsharp mask after I have converted the RAW picture to jpeg. I was just hoping for a quick shortcut.

Maestro

After reading various tutes here and elsewhere this is what I came up with for a pretty difficult picture.

Before


After


I can definitely see some sharpening around the head and the wings, but there is not an incredible amount of difference in my opninion. Perhaps it is just my untrained eye, but I always got a large amount of noise with any more sharpening.

Here is a third example with less of a threshold covering up noise.