3 step sharpening

nope. todays photog are becoming cheap and try to do everything by themself : )

a great lab technician or a digital retoucher as today name, is still a nice addition to a team : )

Hi patrick,

I would love if you can send me your sharpening article (french or english), sharpening has always be a pain in the a... for me.

Thanks.

Hi Patrick

I have sent you email.

Keep up the good work.

Paul

i'm not sure if anyone remembers Andrzej Dragan...he had some interesting methods which appeared to include

sharpening...he was a very talented artist on photo.net a while back...

Patrick,

Thanks for the additional feedback. I had heard several people talk about how pleased they have been with the sharpening capabilities of LR2, I was hopeful that on images that didn't require further CS3 edits, I could avoid going back and forth in between PS and LR. If there is a way to do it and still achieve good results, I haven't figured it out yet.

Regards,

Eric

You don't have to pay to get those sharpening actions. Just go to

http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/Digital-Darkroom.htm

There you'll find a sharpening action kit.

In Bruce's last book he talked about sharpening for source, content, and output. It's worthwhile to buy the book because it's

important to know when to sharpen and how much to sharpen. I have customized my actions for the type of images I shoot.

The complexity of sharpening is definitely something that shouldn't be overlooked

I tried the system from Focus Magic (stand alone exe and PS plug-in) just last week. www.focusmagic.com. The trial allows 8 uses. All the demos shown of this system are quite impressive. They even demonstrate forensic applications such as resolving a license plate on a car that is completely out of focus. The explanation of the main sharpening algorithm is very impressive, but my eight uses proved to be less than magic.

The application may fit the needs of others, but I have the urge to keep pressing on as if I was still driving the old K1000; get the focus tight at the glass end of the camera!

Cheers

I've used the sharpening actions from the <a href="http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/photoshop-tools.htm">

Digital Darkroom</a> for my sharpening. Have some edge and surface masks as well. Love the Digital Velvia also.

I think these work with CS2 and CS3.

I also found <a href="http://pgimaging.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/lightroom-with-actions/">

this article</a> about using actions to create droplets and then use them as actions under LR2. I haven't had a

chance to try it yet. Might be worth a look.

Oh... missed Ted's entry... The second article should still be worth a look.

Is there a way to edit a response?

Cheers

Bruce's book pretty much established the advantages of a 3-pass sharpening work flow to achieve the optimum result for an image and I moved towards this approach when Bruce's and Jeff Schewe's articles on the approach first started to appear.

The testing that I have done has shown that for most images, the 2 or 3-pass workflow is the best approach to achieve an optimally sharp image, although I have found some images where other approaches have produced superior results. Some of Bruce and Jeff's articles can be found here:

http://www.creativepro.com/article/out-gamut-almost-everything-you-wanted-know-about-sharpening-photoshop-were-afraid-ask

http://www.creativepro.com/article/out-gamut-a-two-pass-approach-sharpening-photoshop

http://www.creativepro.com/article/out-of-gamut-thoughts-on-a-sharpening-workflow

http://www.pixelgenius.com/tipsandtechniques.html (see the last article for Jeff Schewe)

The first three of those links give a bit of a chronological order to the development of the 3-pass workflow and the last is a good read from Jeff.

In answer to some of the questions that have been posted in the thread, I hope the following answers and comments are useful:

1. A 3-pass workflow will produce optimum results, but if you are unsure about what you are doing, you might find it easier to stick with a single pass of sharpening and the end of the workflow (but be aware that this is rarely producing optimum result - though the results may definitely be adequate, especially for non fine-art work).

2. If you don't know how to prepare a mask and sharpen through it, then the sharpening tools in ACR and the develop module of Lightroom will be of great assistance for capture sharpening. They both create a mask on the fly and where LR/ACR do it as you change the settings, the equivalent mask in Photoshop requires 21 steps to produce. Additionally, the final application of steps in the RAW conversion is written to apply everything in an optimised series of steps, so you can safely apply noise reduction and sharpening the the raw converter and the final image export from the converter will produce an optimum result.

3. @Ellis, PKS from Pixelgenius is the plugin version of Bruce's workflow, but the developments of sharpening in LR have basically replaced it now. I know that for example, Andrew Rodney and Jeff Schewe now do just about all of their capture sharpening in LR/ACR now and while I'm not sure what they are doing since the release of LR2, Jeff was heavily involved in the development of the creative and output sharpening (since Bruc'es death), so I suspect that they probably do all of their sharpening in LR where they can (though Jeff may comment if he reads this thread). Effectively, in LR, Adobe have taken the 3-pass workflow and written it into the program, so the need to go to PS for PKS is not as great as it was with LR1.

4. @Eric. If you are printing bigger than the native size of the file for the resolution that you would normally want, Bruce showed that the result was just as good and sometimes better, just by sending the file at it's native size and printing at reduced resolution. However, if you are printing at a smaller size, then resizing to a set resolution should give you some advantage. For example, if you are printing at 4 x 6 at 300 dpi, then resampling to 1200 x 1800 pixels + the application of output sharpening in LR should give you the best result. LR will resample and then apply output sharpening, which is the best approach and you should manually do it in that order if you choose to do it in Photoshop or another program as well.

5. @Ted. Glenn Mitchell's LTR sharpening scripts are a very good free tool and they were Glenn's approach to implementing Bruce Fraser's workflow. The main advantage of the Photokit Sharpener over TLR is the level of testing that went into it's development. Not that the TLR tools are poorly developed, they aren't and you can openly look at the scripts and work out the entire workflow yourself. What I have found in testing is that TLR does as good a job as PKS for most images, but for some images, PKS has some clear advantages. For 90% of my work, TLR would do as good a job as PKS, but for me, its often the 10% that involves critical work, so I don't want to accept 2nd best (though I don't use PKS regularly either. I've awlays done things myself, but have always used PKS as the benchmark to measure my own methods).

Sharpening seems to be one area of digital workflow that confuses people, but once you get your head around it, things can flow very quickly. In my opinion, Lightroom, especially since the release of v2 is great for most work, if only Adobe would add softproofing (in a much more user friendly way that it is implemented in Photoshop) and perspective corrections, I'd hardly have to use PS anymore (though I love it anyway).

I hope there is some useful information in there somewhere.

Regards,

Peter

>I know that for example, Andrew Rodney and Jeff Schewe now do just about all of their capture sharpening in LR/ACR

now and while I'm not sure what they are doing since the release of LR2, Jeff was heavily involved in the development of

the creative and output sharpening (since Bruc'es death), so I suspect that they probably do all of their sharpening in LR

where they can (though Jeff may comment if he reads this thread).

Yep...I do print primarily from Lightroom 2.x now and find the level of workflow and efficiency better than printing out of

Photoshop. However, Lightroom/Camera Raw only really address 2 of the 3 sharpening workflow phases, capture

sharpening and output sharpening. While Lightroom 2 DOES have some rudimentary local sharpening, what you can do

with it is limited. (useful, but limited)

I still tend to process final images out from Lightroom into Photoshop for all the power that Photoshop offers including

the ability to do soft proofing. I then re-import the processed tiff file into Lightroom for printing. But since LR 2 I don't

bother doing the output sharpening in Photoshop since I prefer the re-imported image to be free of final sharpening that I

do in Lightroom's Print module.

For images that are not "final fine art" prints, printing the raw image with capture settings and Lightroom output

sharpening is quite good...not a final, final sort of things but useful where the prints do not need to meet a "fine art" final

print sort of criteria...

I suspect that future versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw will advance the concepts of additional local "creative

sharpening", but there will still be a limit to what can be done "parametrically" as opposed to on the pixels in Photoshop.

For that reason I think there will always be a need for advanced local creative sharpening inside of Photoshop.

>So, Jeff, what about fine art prints, how do you sharpen those?

Go from Lightroom, into Photoshop (after using the LR sharpening for capture), then do the full pixel level editing that

may be needed, in layers...do a soft proof to optimize the image for the final out put, save the file (with the payers) and

then print out of Lightroom using Lightroom's output sharpening.

In Photoshop, while I'm working on the image there, I may (or may not, depending on the image's needs) do localized

creative sharpening (usually with PhotoKit Sharpener, sometimes with custom routines that aren't in PKS but might be in

the future) as well as other "pixel manipulation and mangling".

But the key is I use Lightroom (or Camera Raw if I decide to use a Smart Object which is more and more often) to do the

capture sharpening and Lightroom for final output sharpening...

Patrick, I'd like to get a copy of your sharpening article, in English, My Email is mweber@pathcom.com

Regards,

Mark Weber

It's really helping my understanding to read this thread. Unfortunately I'm stuck with DPP and PS7 for the forseeable future, so am I right in understanding that a little capture sharpening in DPP eg level 2 or so followed by post work in PS7 using the high pass filter is my best option for now? I do appreciate that every composition is different and that I need to be alert to differeing equirements for output.

Thank you