Photoshop's 'Bicubic Sharper': good for you?

[kkamin]

I've been trained to use Bicubic Sharper when reducing an image in size. What I don't like is that is seems to over-sharpen my images, especially when I am going to a web resolution of around 500x333. I have been sticking with Bicubic (the default setting), and doing the standard, last step sharpening via a filter.

I do a lot of beauty and fashion retouching, and on those images, the last step sharpening that I do on the image is masked only into certain areas; I avoid sharpening skin textures that I worked hard on taming down, and it makes no sense to sharpen out of focus backgrounds. On those images, I would think if I reduced the image size at some point and used Bicubic Sharper, it would bring edge detail into the whole image and into unwanted areas.

Thoughts and experiences?

 

[Garbz]

Absolutely right. Why sharpen something you don't want to.

I actually use bicubic sharper often when resizing because quite frankly the sharper look gets the girls for most images and I am often quite lazy.

But if you're sharpening for a specific medium, and intend to sharpen afterwards in a more controlled way anyway then there's no reason to pick a resampling algorithm with builtin sharpening.

 

[KmH]

I usually reserve Bicubic Sharper for when I want to up-size an image.