sharper photos

[musicaleCA]

That's not the only issue. Look at your sensor the typical layout of the photosites is:

RGBGRGBGRGBG
GRGBGRGBGRGB
BGRGBGRGBGRG

etc. Thus your 10mpx image is not a record of 10million actual fulll colour pixels, but an interpolation of 10million grey pixels representing red green and blue. This interpolation ofcourse means the image isn't perfectly sharp.

Ah yes. Thanks Garbz. I forgot about the effect a Bayer array-layout-ness-thingy has on sharpness too.

 

[Overread]

just a quick and dirty sharpen - look at the petals at the top and you can see more detailed lines showing though already. If you work from the original and sharpen in stages (as I outlined above) and then compare you should (I hope) see a more noticable difference

 

[itznfb]

just a quick and dirty sharpen - look at the petals at the top and you can see more detailed lines showing though already. If you work from the original and sharpen in stages (as I outlined above) and then compare you should (I hope) see a more noticable difference

i honestly can't see the difference on this crappy work laptop but i'm pretty sure i know what you're looking at. my point is though... by sharpening an already sharp image i generally don't see an increase in sharpness. i see an increase in darkening around the edges. in the sharpened image you're starting to bring out lines and darkness around edges that weren't really there when i was standing there looking at the flower.

also when sharpening especially in this example it starts to almost bring into focus parts of the flower that weren't meant to be in focus by the DOF chosen for the composition. i don't really see it as making any edges sharper or more crisp.

additionally... it's all a matter of perspective. if someone else had taken this shot they may pull the sharpen slider all the way to soft side to create a dreamy looking photo and someone else may stop down the aperture a bit to get the entire flower in focus and pull the sharpen slider all the way to the sharp side to get almost an enhanced look.

edit: i'm also wondering if any of this is helping the OP

 

[Overread]

True points - that is where "selective sharpening" comes in - you can make a new layer, apply a layermask and then only sharpen selected sections of the image - leaving the blurred areas blurred.
Its the same as with noise removal - mostly you never want to remove it from the sharp areas of a shot, but you do from teh blurred - so againt you apply selectivly to only one area.

 

[icassell]

I'm always learning new stuff here on TPF