To sharpen or not to sharpen

[tecboy]

Do you sharpen you images with Lightroom or Photoshop even the image looks very sharped?

 

[deeky]

Only as much as needed for what I want. Others will certainly correct me if I am wrong, but I believe sharpening is one of those 'destructive edits'. Use it to get what you want, but use a light hand if you don't need it. But that probably applies to all edits - why do it if it isn't needed.

 

[tecboy]

Don't know. Just wonder what is the purpose to sharpen the image?

 

[robbins.photo]

Only as much as needed for what I want. Others will certainly correct me if I am wrong, but I believe sharpening is one of those 'destructive edits'. Use it to get what you want, but use a light hand if you don't need it. But that probably applies to all edits - why do it if it isn't needed.

You are wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong!!!!!

Ok no not really, just kidding there.. lol. As far as sharpening is concerned, if the image looks a little soft I will apply a sharpening filter to it, perhaps as much as a second pass on the standard sharpening filter in photoshop. Anything more than that and the image starts to really degrade. You can also use an unsharp mask and get pretty good results with it, here's just one quick introduction article, there is a ton more out there about unsharp mask:

Unsharp Mask: How Do You Actually Use That Thing? | Photojojo

And here's another site with some info on some various other sharpening techniques:

Sharpening in Photoshop -- Part III

 

[KmH]

To sharpen or not to sharpen

Sharpen. Every digital photo you make.

I have ACR (Camera Raw/LR) set up to do light, global 'capture' sharpening to every image I edit.
Then I pretty much always do some local, or 'creativ'e sharpening, and then do a final 'output' sharpening based on how the image will be used.
Images destined for printing can usually handle more sharpening than can images destined for electronic display.
So I have a 3 stage approach to sharpening - capture sharpen, creative sharpen, output sharpen.

Are you talking about globally sharpening an image or only doing local sharpening in parts of an image.
Also edge frequency in an image has a lot to do with how much, and what kinds of sharpening can be done.
Sharpening is all about controlling edge halos because the halos determine how sharp an edge will look.

If you want to learn more about sharpening, these guys wrote the software that is ACR's sharpening panel - Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom (2nd Edition)

 

[vipgraphx]

IF you shoot RAW its almost a given because RAW files are digital negatives and all though when it opens up in camera raw or what ever else you use it uses the default settings. Sometimes they are good and sometimes they need just a bit more.

What I normally will do if I need to sharpen I have created an action in photoshop that will apply sharpening mask. It is very effective and does not put out as much gain in the image like sharpening in camera raw….then I will mask out areas that really do not need it.

BUt to answer your question not always does the image need sharpening.

 

[Gavjenks]

Always sharpen always every time always. Sharpen. Always.

It's a surprisingly complex topic on how to do it optimally, though, annoyingly. If you really get into it, you can spend quite a lot of time doing it just so, and use a lot of advanced stuff. But a sort of quick, but still principled way of doing it that I find works pretty well is the following, in photoshop:
1) Go to the "unsharp mask" filter.
2) Slide up the %age as high as it goes (500%) temporarily.
3) Now slide the bottom slider around until you get to the point where you juuuuust begin to see lines that weren't actually there in the scene (the "halos" that KmH refers to). Pick a spot that has fine details in it for purposes of seeing this. Don't worry if it looks nice just yet, only look for the point where artifacts begin to occur. Leave the slider barely below that point. This will vary WILDLY based on content and how much cropping you did, your resolution, your camera, your noise, etc.
4) Go back and crank down the %age to wherever you think it looks good (usually 100-200ish range for most pictures is what I like. Step 3 is where most of the variation is, this one is more consistent after that)

It's almost impossible to get bad looking sharpening this way, and yet it usually makes a quite noticeable positive difference in the image.


Don't just use auto sharpening filters, etc. Every image demands slightly different tunings, even with the same equipment (a field of grass or corrugated roofing will demand less sharpening probably than a normal scene, since the fine details can easily start looking tacky. And a glamour portrait, of course, demands less sharpening for style). Auto filters are fast, but you're selling yourself short and risking obvious visible artifacts, or ineffective sharpening.

Sometimes, you will want to sharpen different areas in the image separately. A good example is a brick building against a bright clear sky - halos around the edge are probably going to be super visible and distracting, but you still want to sharpen the brick texture, perhaps, so just select the building slightly inside of it's borders, and sharpen, then sharpen the rest more lightly.

 

[weepete]

Yep, I do. I mostly shoot raw, so it tends to need it. I'll also put a little extra sharpening on jpegs too in Lightroom. In Lightroom all your edits are non destructive, it's the way the software is set up and why it's so useful, though I'm not sure about other programs.

There's only two scenarios where I can think of where I wouldn't apply it and that is :
A- if even a small amount of sharpening makes the photo look worse
B- if I intensionally want it to be soft

But that's not very often as I'm quite fond of using the masking feature Lightroom pretty heavily so it's only edges that sharpening is applied to

 

[Tinderbox (UK)]

I never use sharpen on my RAW`s , it because i use an noise filter on virtually every image as they seem too dark to me and when i brighten them up i get a lot of image noise and sharpening would be counter productive.

John.

 

[manaheim]

A little more explanation might be warranted...

Almost all digital cameras have an anti-aliasing screen over the sensor. This intentionally blurs the picture so that the colors "spill over" onto the other individual photosensors. The reason for this is simple... it's an analog world, and a digital camera tries to turn it into X by Y pixels. When you do that, you basically turn all those nice curves and subtle variations into jagged lines.

Therefore, you need to sharpen it slightly in order to get some of that detail back.

There are some cameras that DON'T have the AA filter. Namely the D800E. I don't know of any others off the top of my head... they're rare. They almost all have it.

 

[SCraig]

...I don't know of any others off the top of my head... they're rare. They almost all have it.

Nikon D7100 as well.

 

[CaptainNapalm]

I sharpen all my images to the needed degree.

 

[DaPOPO]

I sharpen textured spaces. I sharpen hair and eyes. If I look at the picture and decide that area needs to be focused on by the eye.. I sharpen it.

 

[AndyjO]

I never use sharpen on my RAW`s , it because i use an noise filter on virtually every image as they seem too dark to me and when i brighten them up i get a lot of image noise and sharpening would be counter productive.

John.

Hi Tinderbox,

Your post reminded me of something I do in post production - i'm very interested in HDR imaging and I like to sharpen my images using Lightroom but I use a handy plug-in called HDRinstant. I was filming at my local docks late december and I extracted the following image from some video footage. As you can see, it is quite noisy (especially the boat):



I then used the aforementioned plug-in and I stacked the images which greatly reduced the noise as you can see in the following photo below:



I increased the shadows and the blacks and changed some other parameters but I think the image is pretty nice (apart from the mark on the lens...).

What do you think?

Andy

 

[amolitor]

I sharpen somewhat haphazardly. Some pictures are just plain soft to start with, and I don't want a high acutance look. If I am intending to print, I try to remember to oversharpen a little, since printers tend to remove sharpness to a degree, roughly.