I don't use dpp's sharpening because it's ugly to me. It produces halo's and noise speckles. I'll try to explain with some examples.
This detail (cropped) original is processed using dpp, without sharpening applied, for your pixelpeep convenience I've enlarged it (using pxel replication/box/fast resize) 200%, basically a 200% crop. You can see it's very soft, it's taken with tamron 70-300:
DPP sharpening applied, maximum sharpening. Note the (artificial) halo under the branche and the noise with smooth patches in between typical for sharpening with a threshold:
photoshop usm applied. Settings: 400, 0.9, 0. There's a halo noticeable as well, and the noise is more uniform, easier to get rid of in noise ninja or neat image:
photoshop sharpening action I made to filter out the halo. Note that sharpening seems a lot less detailed. That shows how much artificial detail is introduced. I could have increased sharpening, or even use 2 passes. One 200, 0.9, 0 and one 200, 1.6, 0 I usually do with this lens at 300mm. It's still noisy, but I'll get to that after this:
To clean up the noise, I run an action to make a mask that brings back unsharpened parts of the original where there's very little detail like bokeh and smooth surfaces. I can make adjustments, or threshold using levels on the mask. Note a little bit of noise around the edges, it looks a bit like jpg noise:
Final image. After that I use noise ninja to clean the rest of the noise out without loosing detail too much because I have taken care of that in the previous steps. It's really smooth and can be too clinical but I like it though, I'll leave it this way. The difference won't show up on small prints but in larger print or on screen, especially with high contrast tft panels the difference is noticeable:
The final full photo looks like this:
If the sharpening in dpp is more than good enough for you, that's great. It's a personal taste. If you want to print photo's large (30x40cm or 13x18" and up) noise will be a lot more noticeable (as well as other defects).
Hi there,
I noticed that a lot of people apply sharpening in PP, for example,
with Photoshop Unsharpen Mask, and don't do it during the RAW
convertion process... Is there any objective reazon for doing this?
I tried the two technincs and the RAW sharpening gives me much more
satisfatory results! So, why using USM?!?
Thanks a lot in advance,
Cirruz
