Is sharpening necessary for landscape work?

<p>Greetings All,<br>

Is sharpening necessary for landscape work? I realize this may strike many as a rather amateur question, but it is one I am currently debating. My shooting ethos is to do my work behind the lens, instead of at the computer. This is not a judgment, merely a preference. For me, the challenge of the photographic endeavor is to expose and compose in the field and otherwise not manipulate the image. Toward this end, the only "manipulator" I used in any part of my workflow is a graduated ND filter (although I am still exploring its possibilities). Beyond the automatic in-camera sharpening that compensates for the weaknesses of the Bayer array, is postprocess sharpening necessary to bring the image into alignment with what was actually witnessed? Alternatively, is it merely one of the many available methods to enhance an image?</p>

you can not possibly produce the best images without some post processing, this may, and most likely will, include some sharpening. It is not wise to think that the image captured on the sensor is as good as it gets, or even representative of what you saw. As for how much sharping, it's up to you and your style but it is most often necessary.

 

You might do yourself a favor and read up on the digital process, and as I like to call it, "the digital system." There are so many parts to capturing an image these days that any one of them can and often will change the out put. At the end of the day, it's all digital and it's all up to you to decide what to do with the data once you capture it. . .

 

Tony

<p>Without knowing all the parameters in your work flow I can't say. But if you shoot raw on a Nikon body you will want to apply some sharpening to get the best quality. Having said that I think many people way over sharpen. I generally apply very little sharpening to my images. You should certainly never see a sharpening artifact.</p>

What's so magic about the camera? Why can it apply what degree of sharpening it thinks is appropriate (or some Canon engineer thought was appropriate), while if you use your judgement you're "cheating"?

 

You can set artifical limits on yourself if you like doing things the hard way, but there's no virtue in it. Every great landscape photographer did some post exposure processing, whether it was Ansel Adams in the darkroom while printing or some current photographer in Photoshop.

<p>What Bob wrote.</p>

 

<p>“Unmanipulated” simply means following a particular old recipe that some people

decided a long time ago was the One True Recipe™. Following that recipe is the exact logical

equivalence of refusing to shoot in anything other than full-auto program mode: all you’re

doing is letting either the camera or the recipe make all the creative decisions.</p>

 

<p>If you like the results, then great — whatever makes you (and your audience / clientele)

happy, go for it. It might even be an effective marketing gimmick.</p>

 

<p>But don’t delude yourself into thinking that there’s any sort of purity involved or that it’s somehow more representative of reality. In the end, it’s still just a small piece of paper with an arrangement of very small blobs of pigment, about as far as one can get from the original four-dimensional scene as one can get.</p>

 

<p>Cheers,</p>

 

<p>b&</p>

<p>If you consider that your work is sufficiently sharp for your purposes without sharpening, then don't sharpen it. </p>

<p>Most people of course would not make the same decision as you, and will sharpen at two or three stages in the journey to finished images. They will all have sharper photographs than you, and they ( if not you) would tend to regard your work as less sharp than they'd like. If that doesn't concern you , don't sharpen it. </p>

<p>We can if you want go on to consider the same issue about curves and saturation, and other post processing tools. If you think that you can, by taking care, replicate what you saw closely without any post processing , then I fear you will be doomed to constant disappointment. A raw image doesn't look "real". But then of course you will have been disappointed all along, because film and the process of converting film to prints most often represents a visible departure from "reality" and indeed one has to ask quite how anyone can remember exactly what that reality in fact looked like by the time you get your pictures processed. You may think you've been occupying the territory of realism. In fact you've been living in the land of plausibility. You can if you wish do the same thing with digital.</p>

<p>If you want to do all your work behind the lens with nothing altering what you captured...</p>

<p>... you are setting an impossible goal for yourself, one that will likely hamper your photographic vision, and one that is out of step with photography as an art historically. It would also be worth thinking about the difference between seeing an actual scene and viewing it as pigment on paper - it cannot, by definition, possibly be a perfect recreation of the original thing.</p>

<p>There is a lot of misleading stuff written about "doing it all in the camera" and so forth and it often creates a false and misleading set of expectations among photographers. I've actually seen people essentially make that argument that "I don't like digital because if makes a false image. I prefer to shoot real images like Ansel Adams (or fill in your favorite name) did." The problem is that photographers like Adams were emphatic and open about the role of pre- and post-processing in achieving their vision.</p>

<p>As to sharpening, why in the world would you not do it? All it does is more clearly reveal the picture data that is already present in your RAW file. (And don't hold any romantic notions about the "picture" that the sensor captures - what it captures is numerical values corresponding to luminosity levels at photosites, and these are then converted into something that you regard as a photograph... according to someone else's notions of how to best interpret these data.) It isn't a phony or artificial thing to sharpen, and you cannot get an optimally sharp RAW capture image without sharpening.</p>

<p>To eschew sharpening is roughly equivalent to a person with slightly bad vision deciding to not wear corrective lenses since the corrected image "would not be what my eyes recorded."</p>

<p>There is much, much more to say about this... but I may have already worn out my welcome on this topic.</p>

<p>Dan</p>

<p>From a slightly different perspective, while the image in it's native size may please you as sharp enough, as soon as you do any reduction or compression there is a need to sharpen the image to some degree, in order regain detail lost on those processes. "Regain detail" is probably a poor choice of words, but crispness and edge detail is lost to some degree when reduction or compression occurs and light sharpening can restore that crisp look.</p>

<p>If you decide you like "Pictorial" results you may even want to blur things rather than sharpen. Of course, what I'm saying is that it depends on what you want the final thing to look like.</p>

<p>Sharpening is the "rouge" of photography: if it shows, there's too much of it. </p>

<p>Be especially aware that sharpening at smaller sizes may become glaringly obvious at full size in a print or even web image. I've seen some results posted in portfolios and the like where it's all too obvious that it is "mutton dressed as lamb" as they used to say about makeup.</p>

<p>Greetings All,<br>

There is here a strong argument for sharpening, one I can accept. There is perhaps a certain implicit vitriol in some of the comments, but I appreciate your many and nearly immediate responses to my query.</p>

<p>Hi Jason: Sharpening, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It really depends on the results you are trying to achieve. Having said that, pretty much any digital capture is going to require some post processing sharpening, unless you are going for that soft focus/dream look. But I would be very cautious with sharpening. It doesn't take much to turn a nice image into a pixalated mess. Photo shop does a pretty good job with its unsharp mask - try it using the sliders. But look at all of your sharpening at 100% - that way you will pick up on pixelation, noise, etc. that oversharpeing can create. If you plan on selling your work, or are looking at making fairly large prints, this is where it will show up. Also, consider SELECTIVE sharpening. Your whole image may not require it, especially if you want to set off one subject within the frame. If you have the $$, consider a PS plug-in, like Pixelgenius PhotoTools sharpener or nik Software Sharpener Pro3. Both do a better job, IMHO, than PS and have excellent application tools to allow you to selectively sharpen. I currently have all three "sharpeners" but find I use PixelGenius almost exclusively.</p>

<p>If you use film and have a lab do an R-print, there is no need to sharpen. If you use a digital camera or scan film, most of your images will need some degree of sharpening to look their best (noting, however, that sometimes you may want a more diffuse rendering for a particular subject, but that is the exception). In the digital world, I don't consider "sharpening" to be a compromise on your standard of doing the photographic work with a camera rather than with a computer.</p>

<p>i for one hate the idea of pping an image. i just do not like the idea of sitting at a pc and fixing an image that should have been shot right in the field. but there is one item i do to all images in the pc and that is sharpen it. the abilities of csx or pse are far better than what is in the camera. so why not use them. the image has to sharpened at some point anyway due to the loss of sharpness that is part of the digital process.</p>

<p>my normal pp workflow is to do whatever touchup the pic needs and i wish then sharpen it and save as. on many pics the touchup is not needed/done, but all images get sharpened. i find myself using a ps plugin for my sharpening. that plugin is Focus Magic, it works very well. there are other software that does the same thing. one item i wish to mention, and that is to me you should never sharpen to a final amount in the camera. the reason is that if you do and pp later and sharpen some more in the pc then you could oversharpen and get bad artifacts from over sharpening. for this reason the sharpening in my 2 dslrs are both set to give a VERY minamal amount of sharpening, knowing the final amount will be done later.</p>

<p>I sometimes sharpen/auto contrast and always set white balance. The color in your photos will never look right without proper white balance. A lot of folks set WB in the field, I set camera on auto and post process. I will look at all photos anyway to get the keepers and it only takes a couple seconds to set white balance and auto contrast.<br>

Jason can you show us some of your work without any PP?</p>

<p>Just for fun - an outline of how I apply sharpening:<br>

http://www.gdanmitchell.com/2009/10/15/how-i-sharpen-a-quick-overview</p>

<p>Dan</p>

<blockquote>

<p>There is perhaps a certain implicit vitriol in some of the comments</p>

</blockquote>

<p>None more than in the opening post :) You didn't just ask a question about sharpening, you went into the old and tired "i am ignorant and i let my camera process my photos, if you do it yourself on Lightroom you are not a true photographer", which is exactly as stupid as it sounds. Unless you store your RAW files away and never look at the photos on a screen of any kind, in which case no post-processing is involved and i stand corrected.</p>

<p>Create good photos however it suits you, and everyone will do the same.</p>

<p>I ditto what G Dan Mitchell says above. I started shooting landscapes in the 1970's with a 4x5 camera. http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=253029<br>

I used the Ansel Adams zone system of exposure and development which is itself a manipulation of the process to capture the brightness range in such a way that the much more limited print paper can represent it. Dodging and burning when making the print were also pretty expected in order to create a print that matches the visualization of how I wanted the finished print to look. I sometimes used a yellow filter to render the sky darker and the clouds more dramatic. Adams used many types of colored filters himself to dramatize a scene. Black and white film by nature does not accurately represent all the colors and manipulation is used to create a satisfactory final printed image.<br>

Now, using a DSLR for a landscape I have used two different exposures of the same scene and blended them in photoshop to accurately capture the dynamic range of the actual scene, which sometimes is much wider than the digital sensor can capture. The resulting image looks "normal" and not "manipulated." Here's an example: http://www.photo.net/photo/4433463&size=lg<br>

I've even shot several shots horizontally and stitched them together for a panorama. http://www.photo.net/photo/4377567&size=lg In that case I "visualized" a panorama and shot a series of overlapping images in order to create what I was visualizing.<br>

Sharpening for me depends on the printed size of the image. Typically I print at 300ppi and for a D80 gives a 8.6 by 12.9 inch print without resizing the pixels. At that size a small amount of sharpening can be useful in a landscape, which has many small details which can be soft from the inherent design of the camera's sensor.<br>

The short answer is: use the tools you have to produce what you are visualizing in your head of what the finished print/image should look like. Adams said this over and over again.</p>

 

<p>Jason<br>

Unless you remember to turn off sharpening in the camera, you are going to get what the engineers who designed your camera thought would be about the right amount of sharpening in the default case. Just the physics of creating a digital image from a real life scene creates a softening of all the distinct edges in the image among other things. Therefore, to get back to a theoretical representation of what you saw through the camera some degree of sharpening would be required. However, as noted above, the process of creating a digital image involves all kinds of processing steps (e.g the algorithm that samples multiple photosites and combines them to create pixels, etc, etc) so the degree of final sharpening is usually left to the photographer. Images where there is absolutely no sharpening are not very attractive and not terribly representative of anything - certainly not "what you saw".</p>

<p>Jason<br>

Unless you remember to turn off sharpening in the camera, you are going to get what the engineers who designed your camera thought would be about the right amount of sharpening in the default case. Just the physics of creating a digital image from a real life scene creates a softening of all the distinct edges in the image among other things. Therefore, to get back to a theoretical representation of what you saw through the camera some degree of sharpening would be required. However, as noted above, the process of creating a digital image involves all kinds of processing steps (e.g the algorithm that samples multiple photosites and combines them to create pixels, etc, etc) so the degree of final sharpening is usually left to the photographer. Images where there is absolutely no sharpening are not very attractive and not terribly representative of anything - certainly not "what you saw".</p>

<p>Indeed, I did not realize until reading the earlier posts in this thread and checking the data on m 450D that shooting in the Neutral picture style essentially turned off sharpening within the camera. This was an intentional choice when I began using the camera, but I did not realize it necessitated the postprocessing later in the workflow. I have begun experimenting with sharpening in DPP, and while I would not say the difference is remarkable moving from RAW to sharpened TIFF, there is no doubt that the sharpening gives my photos greater punch.<br>

At present, my interest is in posting my work online via Picasa (I am still playing with the notion of moving everything to Photo.net or my own URL). Is it advisable to convert the RAWs to JPEGs, and then do the sharpening in the JPEGs? This seems to be what I have been reading on Photo.net and elsewhere.</p>

<p>You also want to think about the fact that your output medium can dictate how much sharpening you need to give any image. An image shown on a computer screen will need less sharpening than a print. Sharpening really isn't one size fits all</p>

<p>Do you "expose to the right" and then adjust brightness in pp? If not, you're not taking full advantage of your digital sensor. This is not like using transparency film in a film camera. If you don't treat it differently you'll lose dynamic range and detail.</p>

<p>For the most critical images you're generally best off to turn off internal NR and sharpening in the camera and instead do it to taste in pp. You can look at your image 100% to avoid going overboard. For the very best IQ you'll want a tripod, mirror lockup and the full dynamic range of your camera. The ND can be handy, but if the camera has enough dynamic range, adjusting an too bright sky will be better done in pp rather than with ND because the ND is unlikley to match the any but the staightest horizon.</p>

<p>jason k- you want to do the sharpening as the last step BEFORE you save as. make sure all other pp steps are done first. and if you do a noise reduction software THAT is the step before the sharpening. if you are going from raw to tiff OR jpeg then you want to do the sharpening to the tiff or the jpeg since that is your final image. again the sharpening is the last item you do do before the save as.</p>

<p>if you really do not want to mess with sharpening in the pc, consider getting/using photoshop elelments 8($99, unless you can get it on a sale) and simply doing AUTO SHARPEN. this is one of the items in the enhance tab. it does a very good job without any fuss.</p>

<p>Gary, that used to be the standard advice but it is now dated. In Photoshop you can (and I do) accomplish sharpening in smart layers. Unlike the old "hard sharpening" that could not be undone or modified, this sharpening can be turned off/on and modified at any time.</p>

<p>I posted a link to my basic process earlier in this thread. The (very) short story is that I typically apply a "smart sharpen" and a USM layer as smart layers and save them in the Photoshop file. When I print or save to jpg I make a copy of this image, flatten it, and apply one-time sharpening for the target image.</p>

<p>Dan</p>

<p>Jason,</p>

<p>It sounds like you stirred up a few hornet's nests, with this simple question ! : )</p>

<p>Why some people get so defensive about this stuff is a mystery to me. I suspect, you and I think along the same lines. You want to do as good a job while pressing the shutter, as you can, and as little time fixing the image the camera saves, later. I don't think there should be anything wrong with that idea. It does seem, that once you get the images into a digital world, you DO need to fix what the camera engineer thought was best. You're just NOT going to get what you used to see with slides. Therefore, expect to need to do some manner of digital editing before you get it the way you want or the way you saw the scene. </p>

<p>I think the idea that you can spend thousands of dollars on a camera and lens and it can't make a properly sharp image, no matter what you do, is just annoying as heck. The fact that you then need to buy hundreds of dollars of software to make it right makes it worse. Yes, I know, it's better than spending all that money on dark room gear, in the past, but it seems ALL photographers need Photoshop, now, and they did not all need their own darkroom before.</p>

<p> </p>