Question About Article

[staciecd]

In the November/December 2005 issue of Layers Magazine, Rick Sammon ran an article "The Digital Camera". At the end of this article, he disaplyed 2 images and said that the bottom image was oversharpened. Why? The bottom image looks better than the top. I tend to sharpen all photographs to look like the bottom on - is this bad?

Thank you!

Stacie

[AdobeAce]

Hi Stacie,

I like the bottom photo as well.

But I wonder if the photo has been reduced significantly in the magazine so that we can't see the problems that the "oversharpening" caused. There might be all kinds of garbage (digital noise) in the sharpened shadow areas when printed at actual size instead of small size used in the article.

Ace

[staciecd]

Hi Stacie,

Thanks for your note. The bottom image is clearly oversharpened—when you look at it at 100% on screen. When we shrank it down to size for the magazine, the effect wasn't quite as dramatic. So you're correct. A lot of people would think the bottom image looks better. Sorry about that! We probably should have either zoomed into a portion of the image, or over-exaggerated the oversharpening. Onscreen, you can see all the halos and noise created in the highlights of the image were Rick applied too much sharpening.

Thanks again for writing in.

Chris Main

[The Repro Kid]

The guideline for sharpening has always been this, If you've sharpened to the point where you can tell it's been sharpened, you've sharpened too much.

Sharpen to the point of just being able to tell it's been sharpened and then back your settings off just a few drops, this will keep you from oversharpening.

What many of the "big boys" do when sharpening is:

First, go into quickmask mode, use a med sized soft brush and mask-out all the hard edges in the image. This can be done loose and quickly, no need for tight, careful work.

Then, exit quick mask mode and do your sharpening as I described above.

Overshaprening is most apparent on hard edges, it causes stairstepping. Your image can handle a lot more sharpening with out anyone being able to tell, if your hard edges are masked out.

In general, the hard edges don't require any sharpening whatsoever.

(you could lay out a good chunk of change for a how-to book, and probably still not find a nice gem like "masking out your hard edges before sharpening." But I'm giving it away, here, for free, folks!)

[grnofslt]

I've looked at the pictures in the article that you mentioned. And at their size, I agree that I like the one that the article's author says was over sharpened. But that is at the tiny size that they are. I am guessing that at their full size the non sharpened photo will look better. I say this because of something I am experiencing now with my scanning of all my slides into computer files. I am using VueScan because Nikon has ceased to support my coolScan 3 with software updates and the VueScan software allows me to use my old scanner. In using its (VueScan's) advanced features, I can sharpen photos in the scnning process. I have this set on for the most part and some of my pictures don't look like photos after the scan, rather they are taking on the appearance of being extremely photo realistic drwings or paintings. Somehow, photographs and give off the idea of sharpness and softness at the same time that over sharpening takes away. That's just my point of view from an artistic sense and not the technical.

Billy Jay