Multipass Sharpening

Started Mar 7, 2009 | Discussions thread
Jeff Schewe Regular Member • Posts: 430
Re: Multipass Sharpening

gmitchel wrote:

I don't share Schewe's hype for ACR and LR2. He just sprayed my
thread on photo.net today re. ACR/LR and their use of Pixel Genius
settings.

Hum..."sprayed" your thread? I just pointed out that users who DO know how to use Camera Raw/Lightroom have the advantage of having 2/3's of of Bruce Fraser's sharpening workflow built in...and I would argue that anybody who does NOT take advantage of Camera Raw's (above 4.1) capture sharpening is leaving image quality on the table...(and using a much slower and more tedious workflow if done in Photoshop). Personally I would keep Photoshop for doing only creative sharpening for effect and not capture or output sharpening...

Camera Raw's capture sharpening does take some reasonable amount of skill and practice. But it's not like it's all that hard–make it look good at 100% zoom (on an LCD display, not a CRT). Sure, you can screw up an image...just like you can screw up an image with just about any other control in Camera Raw/Lightroom...but proper application of radius, detail, edge masking, luminance noise reduction and then amount can give you an optimal image from which you work down the workflow stages...and every image needs some luminance noise reduction and edge masking–if you don't adjust those parameters, you're not really using Camera Raw's tools.

Creative sharpening is, itself, a deep subject with items like midtone contrast (Clarity in ACR) and some more exotic de-convolution algorithms and multi-pass sharpening buildups to create texture where none existed...there's some interesting work being done at some of the major research labs like MIT's Computer Graphics Group ( http://groups.csail.mit.edu/graphics/ ) One of the technologies that came from that group was the Context Aware Scaling in Photoshop CS4 (originally called seam carving when developed at MIT). I recently visited the labs and saw some "very interesting stuff".

So yeah, I guess I don't get too excited by the old and tired Photoshop-based sharpening routines anymore...if you want to characterize that as "spraying" your thread, that's your prerogative...just know that if you aren't working to get the best of your raw captures out of Camera Raw/Lightroom–and that means actually using all of the tool set–you are leaving image quality on the table, needlessly...

: )

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Regards,
Jeff Schewe

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