When To Sharpen

Sean Ealy · September 2, 2011

I was taught some time ago to always sharpen my images while converting my RAW files, and have been doing this some time. So when working with my RAW files I will adjust exposure, white balance, tweak some other things as needed, reduce noise and then sharpen. Then I will convert over to PS to make the rest of my adjustments. Sometimes (but rarely) on a landscape image I will use unmask sharp in PS.

I'm now wondering if maybe I'm missing something by doing it this way? Should I wait to sharpen at the very last of the processing? So after color, contrast, etc has been tweaked?

Looking for some different perspectives on this. Thanks!

Art Scott · September 2, 2011

i was told many many years ago that sharpening should be done very last...especially if your going to uprez and even when I got my 1st edition of Genuine Fractals their instructions stated to do all processing of the image EXCEPT for sharpening, then uprez...sharpen and save as...... I do not like suing any other sharpening method but unsharp mask....I keep trying even new edition of sharpening that Adobe puts in LR and PS and I still find myself going into PS just for unsharp mask sharpening ........but sharpening is like all processing elements...a very personal matter............

I did sharpen 1 pic with the normal sharpening in PS and also a copy with unsharpmask and then I did the same uprez I had done for a client...and they looked real crappy......loads and loads of cruddy ugly noise.

pathfinder · September 2, 2011

Art, while sharpening has been traditionally taught to be done last since one needed to know the final image size and destination to really sharpen most effectively, sharpening in RAW as Capture Sharpening is built into Adobe Camera Raw ( in CS5 and LR3 ) for very good reasons. Sharpening in RAW editing is done in conjunction with Noise reduction in Raw Processing as well as they can each affect each other. The order of edits in Raw Processing has nothing to do with when we set the sliders, but is performed inside the RAW engine at the most appropriate time.

I do perform fairly aggressive Capture Sharpening in Lightroom3, and Output Sharpening for printing in the Print Module in LR3 as well. I also do local contrast enhancement with Unsharp Mask in Photoshop if needed, or even local sharpening. Sometimes I even use masking techniques for sharpening. All of these edits are done to create the image sharpness I desire, not to correct poorly focused, or blurred images due to camera movement. Those inferior images I delete in camera, they never get to my hard drive. The process of digtal capture of an analog image creates some loss of image sharpness due to the process of digitization itself. Capture sharpening is to restore this sharpness lost to digitization.

My gallery is here - http://pathfinder.smugmug.com/ - I think/hope you will agree that the majority of my images are sharply focused, and do not display oversharpening or jpg artifacts. I try to keep the noise in most of them minimized as well, although there are those with grain added for effect as well.

Feel free to point out oversharpened images of mine for discussion in this thread.

Peano · September 3, 2011

Camera Raw is a good place to do capture sharpening, with the automatic edge mask
feature. I do enough there to take off the fuzziness that goes with raw images.

But I almost always need to sharpen again in PS, and I typically use an edge mask of
my own making there. Obviously you don't sharpen images for print the same way you
sharpen for the web. In PS you can also do selective sharpening in PS (eyes in a
portrait, for instance).

As Deke McClelland has said, it matters less when you sharpen than how you sharpen.

arodney · September 4, 2011

Its simple, you sharpen at the beginning for the capture, the end for the output and in the middle if so desired, for creative use. See: http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/20357.html
This is the workflow you’ll find inside Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom*. It was implemented directly from Bruce Fraser’s work.
Bruce before his timely death probably forgot more about sharpening than Deke knows about today!

*ACR and LR don’t really have creative sharpening.

When To Sharpen

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