Don't forget I don't print my web images!!
Well, it is of course entirely up to you, Enda, what and how you print, but printing is its own process, and has nothing to do with
on-screen perception—my opinion remains that at least one of your photographs displayed here is
over-sharpened for its scaling and purpose, hence the halos, which
are visible at 100% view—no magnification is necessary for my not-so-good-any-more eyes.
I think Kirk enlarged part of the frame simply to make the halo-ing more obvious; I don’t think he should be accused of trying to “stack” the conversation.
The aesthetic upshot for me, is that for this
particular image at
this size, on the three screens that I use to get on the web (not all at once!), the rocks look
metallic and
edgy, the sand large-scale
crunchy, and the seaweed too, well,
crispy. I still find it dramatic, but wonder if a less-sharpened version would be
creamier and more
peaceful. It would be interesting to see, for instance, at what point the sand would become a smooth surface with no texture. I think photographers don’t much ponder reproduction at different scales because the camera handles all that, in a complex set of interactions between lens, subject and film, and more recently sensor. Could start going all Nyquist here, but it is relevant; painters have been at the “less is more” workbench for many centuries, and I remain gobsmacked by what a few nuanced daubs here or there can do to create texture and colour that is wonderfully evocative at a “normal” viewing distance.
I adjust output sharpening continually when I process an image at a web-ready size, and find getting a decent compromise can take a number of attempts, sometimes with a end result that is not truly satisfying (I have also been wrestling with sharpening for offset printing for twenty years). That will only change in a positive direction when we have very-high-resolution displays (the 13" MBP I am writing this on has a miserable pixel pitch of 113 to the inch; see other display sizes at
Wikipedia); even the ancient Radius PrecisionView 17" CRT had higher specs! Giant iPhones, anyone?
Would be interesting to know your workflow for preparing images for screen use. I use Capture One mostly, and Photoshop to some extent. I was particularly interested to see that you used no USM in at least part of your workflow; “ …
because of over use of USM which I never use.”. Bit vague, so some explication would be nice. Cheers.
[
added hyphen]