sharpening advice

Kev M

Kev M

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You can call me Sir.
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I'm after some advice about sharpening in Potatoshop, I've tried it in LR1 and didn't like what it did so I'm trying it in PS and still struggling. When I did a basic PS course at college a few years back the advice given was that using the USM filter the amount should never exceed 150, radius should never exceed 1.5 and threashold shoud be below about 5 to have any effect.

I scanned some negatives at 300ppi to make some contact sheets, used the above settings and they looked fine, now I'm doing it on much bigger files those settings don't seem to be having much effect. The original files were about 650px by 650px, the new scans done at 2400ppi are 5000px by 5000.

Does the amount/volume of pixels have an effect on the settings for sharpening and if so how? Can I just use whatever settings appear to have the desired effect on screen or am I at risk of dergading the image?
 
It depends on what your doing with them, if it's for viewing on screen size to your final size, zoom in to 100% and sharpen by eye.
If it's for printing it's a little trickier, as some printers add or lose sharpening during the process there no hard and fast rule, best way is to resize, add a bit of sharpening and make a print, then ajust from there.
 
There are many ways to sharpen I guess you’re just using USM.
Try this way
Make a copy set blend mode to soft light and then add a High pass filter move the slider and have preview on, one advantage to this is you can one adjust the opacity of the layer and Two you can mask out any parts you do not wish to sharpen such as out of focus bits.
 
Cheers Wayne, the big files are for printing. THey're going to be 12x12 so I was hoping to get acceptable sharpness on screen before printing so that I don't waste too much paper.

Trial and error it is I guess. Hopefully lessons learned this time will apply the same for future printing at the same size.
 
Thanks Chaz I didn't know about that method I'll give it a try.
 
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