Image sharpening

welly

welly

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Alastair
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I keep looking at my images with my various lenses - nikon 60mm, tamron 17-50 etc. - and when I look at images from other people on this forum, their images always look significantly sharper. I do shoot in RAW and tend to do a bit of post processing but usually just adjusting colour. Do many of you sharpen your images as part of your post-processing work flow or do just happen to get super sharp images out of the camera anyway?

Cheers!

Welly
 
You would be amazed how sharpening a websized shot can make it look WAY sharper than it actually is. That's why seeing web images doesn't really do you any good when trying to access how sharp a lens is...I've made absolute turds of photo's look sharp for the web that looks shocking at full res. Never posted them though, just an exercise in curiosity :)

Actually I am in the middle of doing a quick write up on my blog of my prefered method for sharpening for the web.
 
I always apply some sharpening to my images, you'd be surprised at the difference it can make. And, as has been said above, you can go a little bit nuts with the sharpening on a shot that's only ever going to be seen at 800 pixels wide, and it looks great.
 
What do you guys use for sharpening your images for non-web use, if you do? I mostly use Lightroom but have access to Photoshop also. Unsharp mask suitable or something else?
 
If you shoot in RAW your shots will always benefit from some sharpening in post processing as they will have had none applied in camera
 
Has anyone used or use Nik Software's Sharpener Pro?
 
Since LR introduced improved output sharpening I've not bothered with anything else :thumbs:
 
I should give Lightroom's image sharpening a go and see what it's like.
 
can i jump in and say that im also confussed about this sharpening thingy, when my pics are full size they seen ok, but when i upload them to the website i loose a lot of quality, where am i going wrong, do you also have this problem WELLY?
 
i used to think the very same (soft ).. they do look different when printed though .
i do sharpen some photo`s , and to be honest with the cost of camera gear i wonder why i should have to ..

i have 2 5d`s with some good glass attached at over £1000 a time .

i own a Canon 85MM Mark II EF f/1.2 L USM and it is as sharp as sh*t .

so why are the others soft :shrug:.

check you tube for some point to point tutorials

rog :thumbs:
 
melevo said:
can i jump in and say that im also confussed about this sharpening thingy, when my pics are full size they seen ok, but when i upload them to the website i loose a lot of quality, where am i going wrong, do you also have this problem WELLY?
Click to expand...


when you have resized the image for web give it another little sharpen hope this helps
 
cheers dreameruk, gunna try that now...
 
The nature of Digital sensors is such that all digital images are slightly soft and require sharpening. If you shoot in JPG sharpening will be applied to the image as part of the process of creating the jpg file. Usually this can be adjusted as a custom function.

If you shoot in RAW all your images will nedd to be sharpened. It is worth reading up on this, trying out several of the methods and decide which is right for you.

"i do sharpen some photo`s , and to be honest with the cost of camera gear i wonder why i should have to ."

As I said above the need for sharpening is part of photographing digitally, and inconvenience perhaps off set by the very convenient ability to adjust exposure, ISO and white balance from frame to frame or as part of the processing of the RAW file.

It's just part of the digital imaging process.
 
Doesn't Lightroom's Develop module apply some sharpening as standard, even before the output sharpening?

I'm pretty sure mine is defaults to 25.
 
there are several sharpening techniques detailed in the forum tutorials section, check them out.
 
What gets me is that when you send photos to some agencies they say don't sharpen so you convert from raw to jpeg and send them. Then they come back with image not sharp!

What do you do?
 
Icee said:
What gets me is that when you send photos to some agencies they say don't sharpen so you convert from raw to jpeg and send them. Then they come back with image not sharp!

What do you do?
Click to expand...

I don't send shots to agencies, but you ca always use a low-halo sharpening technique and not tell them ;)
 
ok if angencies requie no sharpening and digital cameras require some sharpening as mentioned above - what is one to do. surely they must know this is happennig with most shots taken on digital these days?
 
Something I picked up along the way is that if you are resizing an image for the web then a tiff file stays sharper during a resize than a Jpeg. I dont know all the technical ins and outs of why but it seems to be the case with all of my shots. Way better results doing all pp with a tiff file than a jpeg
 
Everytime you do something to a jpeg (resize/change colour etc) you lose some of the quality, this is due to how the file is compressed. With a tiff you store each pixel so you can change as much as you want.
 
Sharpening it's usually the last thing I do when processing an image, and use different sharpening levels depending on output, for example an image for web, particularly with forums like TP that have small image size limits, the sharpening is less than for example an A3 print.

Also, I notice different lenses need different levels of sharpening-my 50mm lens needs almost no sharpening.

I nearly always use smart sharpening in PS
 
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