Pages: 1 [2]   Go Down

Author Topic: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit  (Read 20515 times)

Hening Bettermann

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 945
    • landshape.net
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #20 on: September 21, 2013, 05:57:56 pm »

Hi Bart,

thank you for your fast and extensive reply. - I am all confused...
The thought to use PhotoZoom followed by FocusMagic was trying to combine 3 of your recommendations: PhotoZoom as the best tool for up-sampling to large prints; deconvolution sharpening AFTER up-sampling (but still before print sharpening);  and FocusMagic as the best tool for this (or one of the 2 best, together with InFocus).

But if the PhotoZoom result is not recommendable for subsequent print sharpening, I will avoid it.

So that leaves up-sampling and subsequent capture sharpening. If PhotoZoom is to be avoided, I could use PhotoLine's Lanczos (3 or 8, btw?), followed by FocusMagic. Would these be the best tools available to normal mortals (outside PixInsight)?

I have never heard of a tool that could do capture+resampling deconvolution in one step. By "one-step" I only meant I would rather do 1 deconvolution at the end of the workflow rather then accumulated ones, not that it had to be combined with up-sampling.
(The workflow implies exposure stacking with ImageFuser followed by Focus-stacking with Helicon.)

Can you de-confuse me? :-)
 

Bart_van_der_Wolf

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 8913
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #21 on: September 21, 2013, 06:50:17 pm »

Hi Bart,

thank you for your fast and extensive reply. - I am all confused...
The thought to use PhotoZoom followed by FocusMagic was trying to combine 3 of your recommendations: PhotoZoom as the best tool for up-sampling to large prints; deconvolution sharpening AFTER up-sampling (but still before print sharpening);  and FocusMagic as the best tool for this (or one of the 2 best, together with InFocus).

But if the PhotoZoom result is not recommendable for subsequent print sharpening, I will avoid it.

Hi Hening,

The question is whether subsequent sharpening after upsampling with Photozoom Pro will add much.

It depends on image content. Photozoom Pro is very good at two things. First it does an excellent upsampling without adding artifacts, and second it adds real edge resolution and also some beyond what's in the original image. Expecting it to allow additional deconvolution sharpening may be too much to depend on. It might succeed, but it might also fail.

Quote
So that leaves up-sampling and subsequent capture sharpening. If PhotoZoom is to be avoided, I could use PhotoLine's Lanczos (3 or 8, btw?), followed by FocusMagic. Would these be the best tools available to normal mortals (outside PixInsight)?

The full workflow is; Capture sharpening (preferably by Deconvolution because that restores real resolution) and after some Creative adjustments and resampling for output, Output sharpening.When the resampling for output doesn't add sharpening by itself, Deconvolution output sharpening is advised.

However, Capture sharpening and Output sharpening can be combined in a single operation when the intermediate 'Creative' and upsampling steps do not affect sharpening. When the intermediate 'Creative' steps do affect sharpening, then one should use very good Capture sharpening, Creative steps, and Deconvolution sharpening after resampling.

Quote
I have never heard of a tool that could do capture+resampling deconvolution in one step. By "one-step" I only meant I would rather do 1 deconvolution at the end of the workflow rather then accumulated ones, not that it had to be combined with up-sampling.
(The workflow implies exposure stacking with ImageFuser followed by Focus-stacking with Helicon.)

Can you de-confuse me? :-)

Maybe it helps to follow the logical path that the image data does. Whenever a source of blur is introduced, one has the option to immediately remove it. But that requires optimal removal without introduction of artifacts that can wreak havoc later by accumulation errors upon errors. One often has the choice to combine several steps, e.g. cascaded Gaussian blurs, by a single blur and thus a deconvolution to reverse that blur. Operations that significantly change the image data, e.g. by adding artificial (but convincing) data such as edge resolution or noise (like Photozoom Pro does), will complicate the combination of multiple (prior and later) steps into a single one.

Cheers,
Bart
Logged
== If you do what you did, you'll get what you got. ==

Hening Bettermann

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 945
    • landshape.net
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #22 on: September 23, 2013, 01:00:59 pm »

Hi Bart,
sorry if I am stupid, but - do I gather from your post that the advice to sharpen after re-sampling refers to output sharpening only? In this case I would leave the output sharpening and re-sampling to my print service and do my own deconvolution sharpening at the end of my workflow (that was what I meant by 'one step'), but before up-sampling. So the question is could it be an advantage to do the capture sharpening (by deconvolution) after up-sampling, but only governed by sharpness on screen, leaving the output sharpening, but not the re-sampling to the print service?
Sorry I keep bothering you (and this thread) with my questions, but I feel I need to get to the bottom of this.

Bart_van_der_Wolf

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 8913
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #23 on: September 23, 2013, 02:14:51 pm »

Hi Bart,
sorry if I am stupid, but - do I gather from your post that the advice to sharpen after re-sampling refers to output sharpening only? In this case I would leave the output sharpening and re-sampling to my print service and do my own deconvolution sharpening at the end of my workflow (that was what I meant by 'one step'), but before up-sampling.

Hi Hening,

All resampling should be followed by sharpening. Resampling involves creating weighted average values for new pixels which usually blurs the result and/or reduces microcontrast (or creates artifacts). If the resampling is done by your print service, they should take care of the output sharpening because you cannot do that yourself with pixels that were not yet created.

I would not do any final sharpening on your end at the end of the processing, unless you skipped the Capture sharpening at the beginning of your workflow. It is more logical to do denoising and Capture sharpening as early in the workflow as possible, but outside of Lightroom you will have better quality tools to do both, if one also uses e.g. Photoshop and some quality plugins.
 
Quote
So the question is could it be an advantage to do the capture sharpening (by deconvolution) after up-sampling, but only governed by sharpness on screen, leaving the output sharpening, but not the re-sampling to the print service?

It is an option to do the resampling and (combined Capture +) Output sharpening yourself, and send that result to the print service, but that may be less practical, because we're talking about uploading (or sending a DVD with) potentially huge ready-for-print files, preferably converted to the output profile from the printservice. I also do not know what software your print service uses, maybe they already do excellent upsampling and output sharpening.

Perhaps it's an idea to prepare such a file and crop an 8x10inch part out of it, and compare that with the same crop before you resampled and sharpened it, both printed to the same 8x10in size.

Cheers,
Bart
Logged
== If you do what you did, you'll get what you got. ==

Hening Bettermann

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 945
    • landshape.net
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #24 on: September 23, 2013, 05:09:41 pm »

Many thanks Bart, I think I have understood this now. So I will continue to sharpen during or right after the raw conversion. This will also enable me to use your slanted edge target. - Talking about these high quality plug-ins - would you prefer FocusMagic or Richardson-Lucy?  the latter being available to me in Iridient Developer.
Kind regards - Hening.

Bart_van_der_Wolf

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 8913
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #25 on: September 23, 2013, 05:36:36 pm »

Many thanks Bart, I think I have understood this now. So I will continue to sharpen during or right after the raw conversion. This will also enable me to use your slanted edge target. - Talking about these high quality plug-ins - would you prefer FocusMagic or Richardson-Lucy?  the latter being available to me in Iridient Developer.
Kind regards - Hening.

Hi Hening,

Correct, by doing the Capture sharpening as one of the first things one needs to nail the required deconvolution radius to avoid potential artifacts that would be enlarged later in the output process.

FocusMagic is a long time favorite of mine, but you can start with Richardson-Lucy provided there is not too much noise in the image. Many RL implementations do allow to regulate the Signal to Noise trade-offs so in that case one can tune it a bit better.

Cheers,
Bart
Logged
== If you do what you did, you'll get what you got. ==

Hening Bettermann

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 945
    • landshape.net
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #26 on: September 24, 2013, 04:50:26 pm »

Hi again
Happy to have this in place. - One adjacent question: When should CA-correction be done, before or after deconvolution? Preferably on the raw, or as well on the TIF?
Kind regards - Hening

Bart_van_der_Wolf

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 8913
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #27 on: September 24, 2013, 06:20:08 pm »

Hi again
Happy to have this in place. - One adjacent question: When should CA-correction be done, before or after deconvolution? Preferably on the raw, or as well on the TIF?

Hi Hening,

CA-correction is preferably done as early in the process as possible. Some Raw converters already do it in Raw as part of the demosaicing process. Anyway, it should normally be done before Capture sharpening.

It is possible to do some of it as a postprocessing step on the TIFF, but it is not optimal.

Cheers,
Bart
Logged
== If you do what you did, you'll get what you got. ==

Hening Bettermann

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 945
    • landshape.net
Re: Sharpening - LR vs. Photokit
« Reply #28 on: September 25, 2013, 02:36:12 pm »

Thanks again! It looks like I'm getting this best of all workflows with all the best tools set up eventually :-)
Pages: 1 [2]   Go Up