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Author Topic: What will work better? Sharpening workflow  (Read 8107 times)

Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: What will work better? Sharpening workflow
« Reply #20 on: May 23, 2013, 06:16:33 am »

 Bart quick question.....I am thinking of trying Qimage. You say it applies output sharpening.....does this mean if you have a Photoshop work flow with output sharpening part of it....do you drop your output sharpening in Photoshop and let Qimage do it....and you say it has better results ?

Hi Peter,

As Jeff said, you'll want to avoid double output sharpening. Therefore you must either resample to output size in Photoshop and apply output sharpening there, or let Qimage handle the up-sampling of your Capture sharpened image plus output sharpening. IMO the Qimage path is more efficient because you do not need to produce different files for different output sizes, and Qimage uses better resampling than the current Photoshop algorithms. Qimage does offer the possibility to adjust or even switch off the output sharpening, in case the file was already output sharpened.

Which route gives better results, depends on the up-sampling and sharpening steps in Photoshop. The Qimage quality is very good, and the output sharpening is halo free, so it can be pushed quite far. I usually use the default setting of 5, but it depends on the specific media one uses.

Cheers,
Bart
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John V.

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Re: What will work better? Sharpening workflow
« Reply #21 on: July 05, 2013, 10:19:41 am »

Ok, so what would be advised given this scenario? Suppose I want to use PK sharpener all the way around (capture/creative/output) Do I want to tell Camera Raw to not apply any sharpening? I notice it defaults to 25,1.0,25. I'm guessing yes.
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: What will work better? Sharpening workflow
« Reply #22 on: July 05, 2013, 11:37:57 am »

Ok, so what would be advised given this scenario? Suppose I want to use PK sharpener all the way around (capture/creative/output) Do I want to tell Camera Raw to not apply any sharpening? I notice it defaults to 25,1.0,25. I'm guessing yes.

The Camera Raw sharpening defaults are just that, defaults (no intelligence based on file content or aperture used,  none whatsoever). In fact, analysis has shown, they are sub-optimal in most cases so you may want to skip any in ACR sharpening at that stage, and use PKS all the way if you like.

Cheers,
Bart

P.S. One reason to use ACR sharpening is when you also require ACR noise reduction, because they are somewhat linked.  Of course, when you have a better noise reduction application, e.g. Topaz Denoise, you can do it separately after Raw conversion and before sharpening.
« Last Edit: July 05, 2013, 02:26:24 pm by BartvanderWolf »
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AFairley

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Re: What will work better? Sharpening workflow
« Reply #23 on: July 05, 2013, 01:28:00 pm »

Bart, this thought occurred to me the other day:  Is there any advantage to doing capture sharpening in the raw conversion as opposed to doing it on an already "baked" demosaiced file?  I believe Eric Chan has said that it is preferable to do lens corrections in the demosaic process as opposed to after the fact (though I may have misunderstood what he was saying).
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: What will work better? Sharpening workflow
« Reply #24 on: July 05, 2013, 01:59:39 pm »

Bart, this thought occurred to me the other day:  Is there any advantage to doing capture sharpening in the raw conversion as opposed to doing it on an already "baked" demosaiced file?  I believe Eric Chan has said that it is preferable to do lens corrections in the demosaic process as opposed to after the fact (though I may have misunderstood what he was saying).

Hi Alan,

That depends on at which stage the corrections take place. It is e.g. possible to 'do' Chromatic Aberration correction before actual demosaicing, which would not only improve the color accuracy of the demosaicing itself, but can also help (luminosity) resolution coming out of the demosaicing stage, even before Capture sharpening.

When a relatively mediocre resampling algorithm is used for small resampling adjustments, e.g. lens distortions (especially near the optical center) or rotation/keystone correction, then proper (!) Capture sharpening before the resampling may help to preserve micro detail a bit better.

Here (Rotation examples) is a nice demonstration of the devastation at the micro-detail level that can result from mediocre resampling methods. It's visually even better to make a relatively soft conversion and use deconvolution sharpening to recover some of the detail because it looks more homogenous instead of fading in and out of sharp detail (sharpening that can make it look even worse). Of course it also depends on the actual image detail, because e.g. out-of-focus (OOF/DOF) zones have no micro-detail other than noise.

The key concept is proper Capture sharpening. Without that, all bets are off. That's why I'm stressing the need for proper Capture sharpening so much, it's at the source of what follows. And garbage-in-garbage-out (GIGO) still rules ...

Without such automatic resampling, it's always better to use a superior deconvolution sharpening method after e.g. ACR than as part of the postprocessing in ACR. It complicates the workflow by adding an additional step, but such is the fate of those striving for perfection.

Cheers,
Bart
« Last Edit: July 05, 2013, 02:24:58 pm by BartvanderWolf »
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