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06/11/2004 04:45:45 PM · #1 |
In the tutorial, it states that you sharpen last, but before your final resizing. Elsewhere here in the forums, I have repeatedly seen that people sharpen the already resized picture (for a challlenge, for instance). Do you do a sharpening both times? Or is it a personal preference of one or the other? Thank you all!
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06/11/2004 04:53:37 PM · #2 |
There's never any one answer to this, because images respond differently to sharpening depending on their color, content, and resolution.
The best thing to do is save a final version without any sharpening in TIFF mode, and then try various settings and steps for the sharpening as copies, always keeping the original unsharpened so you can go back and start over.
You almost always need to sharpen as a last step after re-sizing. Whether sharpening before will help can only be determined by experimenting with the actual photo.
Be careful -- I find a lot of people over-sharpen images. Like most things, you want to "use enough [butter] but not too much." (from a 200 year-old recipe.) |
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06/11/2004 04:57:53 PM · #3 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
There's never any one answer to this, because images respond differently to sharpening depending on their color, content, and resolution.
The best thing to do is save a final version without any sharpening in TIFF mode, and then try various settings and steps for the sharpening as copies, always keeping the original unsharpened so you can go back and start over.
You almost always need to sharpen as a last step after re-sizing. Whether sharpening before will help can only be determined by experimenting with the actual photo.
Be careful -- I find a lot of people over-sharpen images. Like most things, you want to "use enough [butter] but not too much." (from a 200 year-old recipe.) |
Thanks! I had always assumed EVERYTHING was done prior to resizing. I am glad I asked.
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06/11/2004 05:06:05 PM · #4 |
The reason you have to sharpen after resizing is the process combines pixels (they can't get "smaller") and in doing so often loses detail and contrast wherever there's fine lines or edges. Because of the averaging which occurs, some of those pixels near the junction get assigned an intermediate color. The USM function attempts to simulate greater detail by increasing the contrast -- making pixels on the lighter side even lighter and those on the darker side darker.
Some examples of various values are posted in this gallery at pBase.
Message edited by author 2004-06-11 17:06:18. |
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06/11/2004 05:10:13 PM · #5 |
I was studying that just last night! I will never have the eye for this that many of you do, or the understanding of color concepts, etc., but your examples help put it much more plainly and I copied down some of the settings to experient with. Do you typically keep re-applying your sharpening, or did I read that wrong?
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06/11/2004 05:19:49 PM · #6 |
I fairly often a lower-value setting twice rather than a more severe setting once, but not all the time; usually I just try a couple of settings to see which looks better. The examples with several repeated applications are just to help mate the effect (and its misuse) more obvious -- I usually only use that technique for "digital art" type images where photo-realism is not a goal.
Note that the settings have to be quite different depending on the image size. The same photo sized for a DPC challenge entry needs a different setting (lower) than a large printable file of the same image. |
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