Smart sharpening action -where do I download?

[charleski]

Re: ACR 4.1 Sharpen, Amount 50, Radius 0.9, Detail 31, Masking 72

I think your amount might be a bit high...but it's real tough to be able to see what's happening to micro detail on a 100% crop that's been saved as a png (or a jpg for that matter).

Though PNG is lossless (just like TIFF) isn't it?  As I said, I saved the originals as TIFFs and imageshack autoconverted them. If the conversion may have incorporatated errors then I should repost them as PS-saved PNGs. If that truly is an issue, then I can repost them as native PNGs.

At the moment, there's a disconnect between viewing sharpening at 100%, 200% and then trying to determine amounts based upon being zoomed out since CR only previews (does the sharpening) on 1:1 or above...we're talking about that...

Very astute (of course!) This is indeed the $64 million question concerning the visual recognition of sharpening artifacts.

The connection between screen sharpness and print sharpness is maddeningly complex and related to the massive difference in resolution between the two. I think we can take it for granted that 'miracle' increases in screen resolution won't happen on a large scale (ie large 200dpi screens) for many years still.

So we're left with trying to judge sharpening on a high(er) res device (the print) by evaluating it on a (relatively) low-res device (the screen). In fairness, many professionals (and I by no means count myself amongst their number) managed to achieve a happy mean during the 80's and 90's.

But...have you made a print?
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Exactly the right question. Obviously we really want to make a print without having first 'maken a print'. Maybe sometime that will be a reality.

[Mark D Segal]

Exactly the right question. Obviously we really want to make a print without having first 'maken a print'. Maybe sometime that will be a reality.
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I don't understand for sure whether your answer means your observations have been coming from prints or from monitor images. If the former fine, if the latter, you may find it revealing to print the various tests you've made and re-assess your observations. They could diverge. I find with PK Sharpener which I am very accustomed to now, and with my LaCie 321 which I am also accustomed to, I can predict the sharpening effect not too badly if the image is at 25% or 50% magnification (Photoshop does not aliase monitor images at these settings). But even so, sometimes one is surprised by prints that come out looking relatively over or under sharpened. Most importantly, it is more often the case, at least from my experience, that minor artifacts you see especially at 100% magnification either don't or hardly show in prints.

[charleski]

I don't understand for sure whether your answer means your observations have been coming from prints or from monitor images. If the former fine, if the latter, you may find it revealing to print the various tests you've made and re-assess your observations.

Yep, you have the critical element here. As far as my observations go, well I hope I've provided enough data for you to judge for yourself. What really matters is what you see on the print, as you quite rightly pointed out.

If you keep within decent dpi bounds, then there's little to nothing to choose between the different methods of sharpening.

I do believe, though, that ACR 4.1 offers an advantage if you need to stray beyond those bounds. I'm not, however, so foolish as to believe that my belief would be shared by all.

I just want to round out this thread by stressing that ACR 4.1 is tha BOMB. This is the reason to fork out for a CS3 upgrade if you're a photographer, it's that good (and if Adobe paid me to promote their products I'd have to spend a lot of time working out how to be more subtle without any 'look dude, decide for yourself' examples ).

[bjanes]

I have it but unless you have a whole lot of time and even more patience there are just way too many permutations and combinations for the amateur photographer. I have also found that certain settings add noise as a byproduct.

Turns out that my favourite is still Focus Magic: clean, simple, no halos or noise.
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I have not tried Focus Magic, but from what I have seen it is not a sharpener, properly speaking, but rather an image restoration tool using deconvolution techniques. The differences are discussed by [a href=\"http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/image-restoration1/index.html]Roger Clark[/url]. He discusses the Richardson-Lucy algorithm, but there are others including  Smart Sharpen in Photoshop. I have become interested recently in deconvolution, but have had difficulty finding out how to use these tools. The key to deconvolution is to choose a proper point spread function that describes the mechanism by which the image blurring was induced, and this is not easy.

Bill