Sharpening - before or after resize?

Urban Grimshaw

Urban Grimshaw

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When I sharpen my images (using the unsharp mask, or more recently smart-sharpen in CS3), I've always done it before I do anything else. Literally the first thing I do, every time.

The reason being, that I've always assumed having the most amount of pixels to work with, and the less noise as a product of a my poor PS skills (which come afterwards..), would give you the ideal slate to give you noise free sharpening.

However, I see a lot of posts where people sharpen after processing or resizing. No posts the other way round. Have I got it wrong..?
 
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HI, I usually Sharpen/NR the Raw file before exporting it. (Lightroom or Camrera Raw)
If you slide the Mask slider up on sharpening and hold the Alt key you see exactly what its sharpening, it then only sharpens required edges instead of the whole image, this will certainly reduce noise.

Then after cropping it to my required size I Sharpen with Unsharp Mask until it looks good to the eye. If further NR is required at this point I use Noise Ninja Plugin for PS.
 
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Is it not obvious just using the human eye? Clarity reduces when size of a pic is reduced. So sharpen after processing/file reduction.
 
Always sharpen last. Keep your original unsharpened and sharpen a copy for whatever out put is required.
 
Initial sharpening - one of the first things to do (still while working with RAW). After exporting to PS and all the rest is done, doing my resizing and after tiny bit more of sharpening as cropping always tend to blur the image a little bit.
 
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=ReBeL= said:
as cropping always tend to blur the image a little bit.
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I think you mean resizing... Cropping doesn't change sharpness at all ;)

As to the OP's question... nearly always the last thing that is done for me. There are exceptions - for example when I'm adding noise back into the image for a specific look...
 
gun2dahead said:
Is it not obvious just using the human eye? Clarity reduces when size of a pic is reduced. So sharpen after processing/file reduction.
Click to expand...

When working in PS, I always find the sharpness looks a bit ropey unless viewed at 100%. I don't know if this is something anyone else has noticed or has a workaround for.

Obviously I'll occasionally view at 100% to check things like the sharpening, but generally in PP I need to see the whole image to see what's going on. So for exampe, if I then resize to fit to screen, the image will look better after being resized, rather than viewing the original at 30% size.. I find there's a bit of guesswork in what the final output will look like.
 
Urban Grimshaw said:
When working in PS, I always find the sharpness looks a bit ropey unless viewed at 100%. I don't know if this is something anyone else has noticed or has a workaround for.

Obviously I'll occasionally view at 100% to check things like the sharpening, but generally in PP I need to see the whole image to see what's going on. So for exampe, if I then resize to fit to screen, the image will look better after being resized, rather than viewing the original at 30% size.. I find there's a bit of guesswork in what the final output will look like.
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It looks fine as long as it's viewed at 12.5%
25% 75% 100% etc if it's viewed at 33% etc it will look poor.

Well that's what I noticed on my setup.
 
Urban Grimshaw said:
When I sharpen my images (using the unsharp mask, or more recently smart-sharpen in CS3), I've always done it before I do anything else. Literally the first thing I do, every time.

The reason being, that I've always assumed having the most amount of pixels to work with, and the less noise as a product of a my poor PS skills (which come afterwards..), would give you the ideal slate to give you noise free sharpening.

However, I see a lot of posts where people sharpen after processing or resizing. No posts the other way round. Have I got it wrong..?
Click to expand...



I do apply a small amount of sharpening in LR but not much (sometimes called RAW or input sharpening). The bulk of my sharpening is done last, after resizing etc. This is commonly called output sharpening.

In lightroom the sharpening is kind of applied last, after noise reduction etc, because its designed to work that way, and you can have it apply extra output sharpening depending on its intended use on export (theres a check box and options in the export dialogue). I believe the print module also can apply output sharpening too.
 
Some people favor a 2 or 3 stage sharpening, one is a capture sharpen (mild) in the raw converter, this just replaces the softness caused by the AA filter on the camera. The second stage is a creative sharpen say maybe the eyes in a portrait or forground intrest in a landscape (best done late in the processing) and the final step is output sharpening, this is done at output size and varies for print/web ect.
As said photoshop doesn't show sharpening or noise reduction correctly at anything other than 100% although it is close enough at the 12-25-50% in between sizes don't show it correctly due to interpolation of the display.
A good book on sharpening is Real world sharpening by Bruce Fraiser and Jeff Schewe.
 
Oxford_Matt said:
It looks fine as long as it's viewed at 12.5%
25% 75% 100% etc if it's viewed at 33% etc it will look poor.

Well that's what I noticed on my setup.
Click to expand...

It's a lot easier to accurately calculate the values of the pixels when you're knocking 4, 16 or 64 squares down to one than, say, 9, 49 or any random number dictated by the size of your screen.
 
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