Do you still sharpen?

I know sharpening had a big place in photography due to low resolution
digital cameras. The pictures were just too soft without a touch of
sharpening. Even so the recommendation was to sharpen only just prior to
printing.

Well, a couple of things have happened. We're doing less and less printing
due to costs, and the convenience of just viewing the files on our computer
monitor. Emailing, posting on Flickr, etc. At least with me, actually
printing is getting rarer and rarer. And anything over 1024x768 (my monitor
setting) has to be resized downward to be viewed.

The other thing that happened is the MPixel race is now up to huge numbers,
8MP, 10MP, etc. The detail level is now so much higher than it used to be,
so less sharpening would seem to be needed.

With my 8MP camera, even slight sharpening makes it look over-sharpened on
my monitor. About all even slight sharpening does is amplify sensor noise.

So is it time to retire sharpening?

Bruce.

No, sharpening is very important even if you don't print you need to sharpen
for other output devices such as other monitors on the web. It is a very
complex subject and I recommend the late Bruce Frasers book "Real World
Sharpening for CS2" (I think this is the correct title) - anyway look on
Amazon for books by Bruce Fraser. I found the information in this book to
be excellent. He recommends a three step sharpening workflow
1 To correct for source blur (ie anti aliass filter in cameras) etc.
2 creative sharpening for the image icontent tself (ie artistic sharpening)
3 output sharpening to counteract the output device blur (ink spread and
dithering on ink jet printers)
Bruces book shows why the oversharpening crunchieness on the monotor ocurrs
and how to control.

regards
Malcolm

Bruce. wrote:
I know sharpening had a big place in photography due to low resolution
digital cameras. The pictures were just too soft without a touch of
sharpening. Even so the recommendation was to sharpen only just prior to
printing.

Well, a couple of things have happened. We're doing less and less printing
due to costs, and the convenience of just viewing the files on our computer
monitor. Emailing, posting on Flickr, etc. At least with me, actually
printing is getting rarer and rarer. And anything over 1024x768 (my monitor
setting) has to be resized downward to be viewed.

The other thing that happened is the MPixel race is now up to huge numbers,
8MP, 10MP, etc. The detail level is now so much higher than it used to be,
so less sharpening would seem to be needed.

With my 8MP camera, even slight sharpening makes it look over-sharpened on
my monitor. About all even slight sharpening does is amplify sensor noise.

So is it time to retire sharpening?

Bruce.


Many P/S compacts apply a lot of sharpening to their images by default.
To a Newbie, the highly sharpened image looks "better".
Ergo, more sales.
If you add additional sharpening to an already sharpened image, you get
some strange artifacts or as you say, "oversharpening".
Some (most?) of the better P/S cameras let the user set the amount of
sharpening. If you don't mind (or enjoy) editing images, I'd recommend
using a lower degree of in-camera sharpening.
If you are really into editing and your camera has the feature, use RAW.
Bob Williams

Bruce. wrote:
I know sharpening had a big place in photography due to low resolution
digital cameras. The pictures were just too soft without a touch of
sharpening. Even so the recommendation was to sharpen only just prior to
printing.

Well, a couple of things have happened. We're doing less and less printing
due to costs, and the convenience of just viewing the files on our computer
monitor. Emailing, posting on Flickr, etc. At least with me, actually
printing is getting rarer and rarer. And anything over 1024x768 (my monitor
setting) has to be resized downward to be viewed.

The other thing that happened is the MPixel race is now up to huge numbers,
8MP, 10MP, etc. The detail level is now so much higher than it used to be,
so less sharpening would seem to be needed.

With my 8MP camera, even slight sharpening makes it look over-sharpened on
my monitor. About all even slight sharpening does is amplify sensor noise.

So is it time to retire sharpening?

I guess you're too young to have known about film era sharpening. In
the development of both negatives and prints (or slides) the chemical
diffusion rates, exhaustion rates, and agitation timings were set to
perform edge sharpening by chemical means. So if you want your digital
images to look like good film era prints you will need to apply
sharpening, and it needs to be applied at the specific resolution
chosen for printing or screen viewing.

So with modern digital images you need more kinds of sharpening,
because you have more choices. You need to sharpen at the A5 print
size for the prints you're sending your mother-in-law. You also need
to sharpen seperately at each of the screen sizes you've chosen as the
display options for your screen viewed images.

That's if you want the same kind of sharpening as was applied by the
standard film era chemical development methods.

If you're fussy you may want to explore the very much more
sophisticated sharpening methods available for digital images.

If you have principled objections to sharpening of any kind then I'm
afraid you'll have to wait for pharmacology to some up with some way
of turning off the sharpening done by your retina and brain. The
reason for applying sharpening to camera images is the same as the
reason for applying white balance colour correction: our eyes and
brain process images of things differently from looking at the things
themselves, so trying to make images of things look like the real
things as seen by the naked (but extremely sophisiticated and
resourceful) eye (and brain) will always require quite a bit of
tinkering.

--
Chris Malcolm DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

Bruce. wrote:
[]
So is it time to retire sharpening?

Bruce.

Briefly - it depends what effect you are trying to create, and what the
final display device is.

Cheers,
David

On 5/23/08 6:51 AM, in article
, "Rita Berkowitz"
wrote:

Bruce. wrote:

So is it time to retire sharpening?

Yes. When using decent hardware such as the Nikon D3 and Nikkors you find
that images are almost too sharp. A lot of people aren't used to seeing
sharp images and have a hard time comprehending this wonderful result when
they see it.

Except, of course, where Rita super-glued that #2 Softar on 'her' D3 lens.
It has to be the only reason that those images look like they were shot in a
fog.

"Chris Malcolm" wrote in message
...
I guess you're too young to have known about film era sharpening. In
the development of both negatives and prints (or slides) the chemical
diffusion rates, exhaustion rates, and agitation timings were set to
perform edge sharpening by chemical means. So if you want your digital
images to look like good film era prints you will need to apply
sharpening, and it needs to be applied at the specific resolution
chosen for printing or screen viewing.

So with modern digital images you need more kinds of sharpening,
because you have more choices. You need to sharpen at the A5 print
size for the prints you're sending your mother-in-law. You also need
to sharpen seperately at each of the screen sizes you've chosen as the
display options for your screen viewed images.

That's if you want the same kind of sharpening as was applied by the
standard film era chemical development methods.

If you're fussy you may want to explore the very much more
sophisticated sharpening methods available for digital images.

If you have principled objections to sharpening of any kind then I'm
afraid you'll have to wait for pharmacology to some up with some way
of turning off the sharpening done by your retina and brain. The
reason for applying sharpening to camera images is the same as the
reason for applying white balance colour correction: our eyes and
brain process images of things differently from looking at the things
themselves, so trying to make images of things look like the real
things as seen by the naked (but extremely sophisiticated and
resourceful) eye (and brain) will always require quite a bit of
tinkering.

Thank you for the the feedback and information. I did do some B&W printing
in my youth (and color slide developing) but never got advanced enough to
know what sharpening was.

I have no objection to sharpening, so long as the result seems pleasing to
my brain, which I admit is totally subjective.

This subject came up for me because I just bought Adobe PhotoShop Elements 6
and have been trying to use it's Smart Autofix feature. The result is most
often an oversharp picture, over emphasising small detail and image noise.
As another posted mentioned, it may be that my Canon A-720 already sharpens
the picture and so the images can't stand even more sharpening. I've tried
to do some manual sharpening, but I almost universally dislike the result
unless I do so little as to make the sharpening pointless.

I appreciate your point about how the brain processes images. Just as
obvious as the wrong color balance in prints can be to us, I'll try to
compare what I see in prints to the original with sharpening in mind.

Thanks to everyone for the great opinions and feedback.

Bruce.

Ï "Chris Malcolm" Ýãñáøå óôï ìÞíõìá
...
Bruce. wrote:
I know sharpening had a big place in photography due to low resolution
digital cameras. The pictures were just too soft without a touch of
sharpening. Even so the recommendation was to sharpen only just prior to
printing.

Well, a couple of things have happened. We're doing less and less
printing
due to costs, and the convenience of just viewing the files on our
computer
monitor. Emailing, posting on Flickr, etc. At least with me, actually
printing is getting rarer and rarer. And anything over 1024x768 (my
monitor
setting) has to be resized downward to be viewed.

The other thing that happened is the MPixel race is now up to huge
numbers,
8MP, 10MP, etc. The detail level is now so much higher than it used to
be,
so less sharpening would seem to be needed.

With my 8MP camera, even slight sharpening makes it look over-sharpened
on
my monitor. About all even slight sharpening does is amplify sensor
noise.

So is it time to retire sharpening?

I guess you're too young to have known about film era sharpening. In
the development of both negatives and prints (or slides) the chemical
diffusion rates, exhaustion rates, and agitation timings were set to
perform edge sharpening by chemical means. So if you want your digital
images to look like good film era prints you will need to apply
sharpening, and it needs to be applied at the specific resolution
chosen for printing or screen viewing.

So with modern digital images you need more kinds of sharpening,
because you have more choices. You need to sharpen at the A5 print
size for the prints you're sending your mother-in-law. You also need
to sharpen seperately at each of the screen sizes you've chosen as the
display options for your screen viewed images.

That's if you want the same kind of sharpening as was applied by the
standard film era chemical development methods.

If you're fussy you may want to explore the very much more
sophisticated sharpening methods available for digital images.

If you have principled objections to sharpening of any kind then I'm
afraid you'll have to wait for pharmacology to some up with some way
of turning off the sharpening done by your retina and brain. The
reason for applying sharpening to camera images is the same as the
reason for applying white balance colour correction: our eyes and
brain process images of things differently from looking at the things
themselves, so trying to make images of things look like the real
things as seen by the naked (but extremely sophisiticated and
resourceful) eye (and brain) will always require quite a bit of
tinkering.

--
Once upon a time I used Acutol, a B&W developer that was supposed to enhance
the acutance (or sharpening) of B&W negatives. I quite liked the results. I
was using usually Rodinal Special, an Agfa "fine grained" developer. These
days, I sharpen moderately, including my pencils
:-)))


--
Tzortzakakis Dimitrios
major in electrical engineering
mechanized infantry reservist
hordad AT otenet DOT gr

On 2008-05-22 20:11:09 -0700, "Bruce." said:

I know sharpening had a big place in photography due to low resolution
digital cameras. The pictures were just too soft without a touch of
sharpening. Even so the recommendation was to sharpen only just prior to
printing.

That should have been your first clue. If we were sharpening because of
the image quality coming from the camera, it would be the first step in
the process, not the last.


Well, a couple of things have happened. We're doing less and less printing
due to costs, and the convenience of just viewing the files on our computer
monitor. Emailing, posting on Flickr, etc. At least with me, actually
printing is getting rarer and rarer. And anything over 1024x768 (my monitor
setting) has to be resized downward to be viewed.

Lower resolution for web actually seems to require more sharpening than
a picture being prepared for high resolution printing. I would not post
anything more than 800 pixels on a side on the web and I use a
resolution 72 dpi.


The other thing that happened is the MPixel race is now up to huge numbers,
8MP, 10MP, etc. The detail level is now so much higher than it used to be,
so less sharpening would seem to be needed.

Higher resolution does not necessarily mean sharper images. You might
have a little more detail, but detail is not the same thing as sharp.


With my 8MP camera, even slight sharpening makes it look over-sharpened on
my monitor. About all even slight sharpening does is amplify sensor noise.

So is it time to retire sharpening?

Bruce.

No. When you edit a picture, you change and lose information. The
effect is to make the image appear softer. You will still need to
sharpen a picture after editing, no matter how sharp the original was.

Sharpening in a computer is not the same as using a sharp lens or
getting a sharp picture in-camera. It does not look the same, either.
What sharpening really does is create a series of blurred layers and
then uses these blurs to cancel out perceived unsharpness. You can use
Gaussian Blur to duplicate anything Unsharp Mask does. That is why it
is called Unsharp Mask, eh? It uses Gaussian blur masks to mask out
anything that is not sharp. But the effect is that sharpening will
always lose some detail in the process.

If you want a truly sharp image, you have to do as little processing as
possible, including sharpening.

--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

"Allen" wrote in message
...
Chris Malcolm wrote:
snip

I guess you're too young to have known about film era sharpening. In
the development of both negatives and prints (or slides) the chemical
diffusion rates, exhaustion rates, and agitation timings were set to
perform edge sharpening by chemical means. So if you want your digital
images to look like good film era prints you will need to apply
sharpening, and it needs to be applied at the specific resolution
chosen for printing or screen viewing.
snip

Rodinol! (perhaps Rodinal). You've brought back fond memories of my b/w
processing days. Rodinol gave me amazingly sharp 35mm images. I wonder if
it is still being manufactured--a moot point as my daughter now has my
last film camera.
Alen

Acutol - Rodinal, they were never very good for apparent sharpness.

What you really needed was tri-X developed in Beutler, the "Edge Effect" was
outstanding. I am not saying it was sharp, but it certainly looked sharp,
with that little narrow band of opposing tone at the edges where light met
dark.

It was not for sissies, it had to be made up from raw materials.

Roy G