Sharpening (Poll)

[Dallmeyer]

Sharpening (Poll)

 

[Goontz]

Sharpening is (sometimes) part of the editing process, which I always do before any resizing (or even exporting from RAW to JPG for that matter).

 

[Flash Harry]

Its the final step in any photographers workflow after all editing is finished. H

 

[Aye-non Oh-non Imus]

^^ too right!

 

[Sw1tchFX]

It should always be the last step becuase it's so destructive, but depending on the application, i'll sharpen in the RAW converter slightly which is generally enough, but if I print huge, i'll do it after resizing too.

and when you interpolate in 10% steps up to your size and then sharpen, big enlargements can look great. i've got some 20x30's that came out awesome that way, often being as sharp or sharper than the medium format film that gets scanned in by my classmates.

I'm not sure how he did it, but Thom Hogan in his D3x Review has a 100% crop from a D3 that's been uprez'd that has just as much detail as the D3x SOOC.

I've been meaning to email him about that..

 

[Overread]

I sharpen both before and after resizing - though my method is typically going downscale rather than up (though as Switch just said going up appears to be similar in benefitting from regular sharping at each resize stage).

Essentailly sharpening before you resize means that you are resizing an overall sharper image and thus the resized version is sharper to start with. That then means that on the resized version you only have to sharpen at a lesser amount than if you had resized without sharpening - thus you end up destroying far less data (through sharpening) on teh smaller version of the shot.

Typically I resize in 2 stages as well -
from 3500ishpixels on the longside at fullsize - sharpen
resize to 2000pixels on the longside - sharpen again
resize to 1000pixels on the longside - sharpen a final time (this is often just a very minor touchup sharpen and very little is needed).

These days I then let flickr resize (and sharpen) smaller versions for use on the net when I upload the 1000pixel version. However in the past I would also have resize and sharpen stages for smaller versions.

 

[Christie Photo]

I sharpen right before printing, but do not save the sharpened file.

-Pete

 

[Cedar]

I always do all my color adjusting first, all my cropping and such, the final step is the sharpen. Like most have said, it's the most destructive.

 

[Fraginator3000]

I do it some way through post processing. Whenever i remember too basically

 

[Garbz]

Sharpening for effect in various parts of the image is quite a legit technique before resizing, but for image wide sharpening if you're doing it before the resizing step you're missing the point.

Sharpening should be done to make the final picture look good. Resizing algorithms create their own sharpening afterwards as well. This may or may not be the effect you're after but it won't be tailored to the final image.

I even go to the lengths of saving my final JPEG unsharpened, simply because sharpening takes about 10 seconds of effort so if I am going to send someone a picture it's always, open my image, resize, make sure I'm at 100% zoom, sharpen, save, send/upload.

If you sharpen first then resize the sharpening effect changes depending on the sampling algorithm and final image size. I don't like it