Less than impressed with Smart Sharpening

I have been reading about SS because GIMP now has a plug-in for it. I suspect high-res LCD monitors have changed

the art of sharpening. Many of the online tutorials seem to make an image worse after sharpening, I find. Maybe

the images are improved on a CRT monitor, but CRTs are rare now. Of course sharpening is useful for printing, but that is not what interests me now.

 

It is stated in several places that Remove > Gaussian Blur is similar to USM, so people do not recommend it; they

use Remove > Lens Blur instead. Do you agree? I really cannot see much difference between them, except that Gaussian Blur seems a bit stronger. That is, Gaussian Blur 90% = Lens Blur 100%.

 

The Remove > Motion Blur option does not seem to work in CS2. Did it start working in later versions? (Over a

year ago I posted about this and FocusMagic, which does work.)

 

Does Smart Sharpen have a threshold function as in USM? I find threshold very useful, but I do not see an option

for it in CS2.

<p>Bill -</p>

<p>Ditto. I know some guys who really like Smart Sharpen, but after a few attempts to use it, I've pretty much given up on it, and now completely ignore it. I can do everything I need with Focus Magic (as you mentioned), USM, and occasionally Topaz Sharpen. </p>

<p>Obviously, I'm not the guy to answer your questions about this tool. </p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>PS - In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't tried it in CS4. I'm still using CS3.</p>

<p>I still prefer to use an edge mask then just apply the normal unsharp filter. As well, I'll use the history brush to either take some of it out or put it in as I see the need.</p>

<p>http://www.espacephotos.com/photonet/TUTORIAL/smartsharpen_eng.pdf</p>

<p>Try this. Patrick kindly provided this tutorial on Smart Sharpening which I now use for 90% of my capture and creative sharpening.</p>

<p>Bill:</p>

<p>If you're just wanting to sharpen for display on your monitor, enter a lower percent. Sharpening for your own monitor is easer than for print. If it doesn't look right, do it over. You have instantaneous feedback. :)</p>

<p>Eric</p>

<p>Bill, for me Smart Sharpen is the best thing Adobe put in Photoshop for serious user who are very dmeanding..like me.</p>

<p>Heres a quick example of a difference you will achieve from your regular highpass / usm technique that require fidling around numbers and trial and error..and the simple 3 setting Smart Sharpen.</p>

<p>You cant be disapoint with something you dont fully understand, can you? ; )</p>

<p>tell me from this example that Samrt Sharpen is deceiving....</p>

<p>by the way, nothing on the market i have seen give better result as fast and as simple. Of course many plugin are out there that with a push of a button you get a spectacular result, but its not free, and it wont be better than this... so since you alreayd paid a good amount of $ to get Photoshop..why dont use it correctly ; )</p>

<p>As another user said, i have a quick free tutorial that will certainly change the way you use SS, and it is well explain why you also need 3 step in your sharpening process (if you go to print, if not, then just 2 step could be use)</p>

<p>let me know.</p><div></div>

<p>Bill,</p>

 

<p>As you can see, Patrick gets great results with Smart Sharpen. I’m personally a fan of

high pass sharpening for lots of images. (In case you don’t know: duplicate the layer, set the

mode to overlay, and run the High Pass filter with a radius of about 1 pixel. Use smart filters and it’s easy to tweak.) Some images do better

with one or the other. And, in some cases, some <em>parts</em> of an image do better with one or the other

(or none at all), in which case you wind up doing both and masking out selected parts.</p>

 

<p>There isn’t any magic button you can press for this. You simply have to experiment with

lots of options. After a while you get better and faster at it.</p>

 

<p>Cheers,</p>

 

<p>b&</p>

<p>Ben, with all respect, i think that when you have find the correct settign in Smart Sharpen, witch is kind of always 225%, radius 1.1, lens blur and do not check the more precise button (dotn need ever to touch the more advanced tab by the way) you will get a perfect most of the time if not ALL the time a perfect result as a first sharpen.</p>

<p>Then in need, what i suggest is another pass on part you want to enhence further more and use a mask to apply it...</p>

<p>With respect to high pass that i use for 7 years on the 10 im doing this professionaly, is that Smart Sharpen is way more precise and more delicate vs high pass (as you can see on my example) High pass seem to keep the soft focus but enhance the edge making the file look more precise, but in fact its not. Have a look at the file i upload, a perfect example of what im talking about.</p>

<p>The only time i still use the high pass is when after a interpolation i need to enhance the detail i have (smart sharpen give a too much natural look) or when i want to have a more crunchy look a la silver efex high structure ; )</p>

<p>Patrick,</p>

 

<p>It’s a vanilla <i>v</i> chocolate thing. The thing I don’t care for as much about

Smart Sharpen is that it can still create halos, even if very slight ones. They’re just

<em>barely</em> visible in your example above. Some people don’t mind them; some

prefer them; some find them distracting. I find myself in all three camps, depending on the particular

image.</p>

 

<p>High pass sharpening is great for avoiding halos, as you’ll never get a halo when you use

it. On the other hand, it has a tendency to step on fine details, as your example above

demonstrates.</p>

 

<p>That you prefer vanilla to chocolate and use it more often, and that I’m the opposite, is

perfectly okay. Just because I eat more chocolate than vanilla doesn’t mean I don’t

like vanilla — quite the contrary. And, often, the best desserts have both in suitable

proportions, perhaps even with some other goodies mixed in as well.</p>

 

<p>(For the record, I think your Smart Sharpen example above is spot-on and an excellent application of sharpening.)</p>

 

<p>Cheers,</p>

 

<p>b&</p>

<p>I am also a Smart Sharpening fan in general, also using it about 80% of the time. Some people over-use the tool and the results are overly-obvious and un-natural. I generally sharpen to taste as a first step, then back off by about 60-70% (depending on the size of the file). I find that applying tonal adjustments, saturation, and other tweaks, can over-emphasize the apparent sharpness. After I'm good with the adjustments, and before converting the file from 16bit to 8bit at final size, I will give it a final sharpening.</p>

<p>Hi Michael,</p>

<p>i also reduce the first pass from 225% to around 150%, leaving me the extra 125% or so to be had later on with mask as the second pass of my sharpen method (it is better explain in my tutorial vs here ; )</p>

<p>Since Smart Sharpen is the first thing i do when the file is open in Ps, i dont apply this filter over other effect so the risk of having a bad original is close to 0. I dont agree about SS creating halo IF use correctly, it is in fact what push me to use this filter vs high pass, where you can get easily halo if the effect is too strongly apply and depending of the choice of overlay / soft light you could also push the effect further in the halo creation IF not use correctly.</p>

<p>I agree with you Ben that final result is a matter of taste, i personnaly like natural result so halo is not a option for me, in fact when i see some it ring a alarm in my head " my god, this guy applied a too strong sharpen to is file" kind of ; )</p>

<p>thanks for the good word.</p>

<p>In the end, nothing is beter than doing a test, so i invite the OP and any other user to use it as i describe and give me your oppinion after, with a image post that would be pretty cool; one with your method / one with my method like my example.</p>

Thanks Patrick for your comments, and Howard for pointing me at Patrick's tutorial. I remember downloading it some time ago, but could not find the PDF on my hard disk. Good to know that the More Accurate checkbox is inadvisable, because it is slower (one web comment says) because it is a two-stage process.

<p>

In <a href="http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00HJBk">this 2006 thread</a>, Robert Vine says "use 20% 1.0 on the highlight tab to remove haloing." Not sure whether he meant 20% Fade Amount or 20% Tonal Width. Probably the latter. With Radius=1, there is no difference than I can see in changing Fade Amount from default 50% to Robert's recommended 20%. It does make a slight difference with Radius=5, but nobody in their right mind would use such a large radius.

<p>

My workflow does not allow for a Capture sharpening phase, because I start by Lanczos (or Bicubic) downsampling the out-of-camera JPEG. This greatly improves Bayer-pattern images,* so I suppose this is akin to capture sharpening. Images look dramatically better if I apply Smart Sharpen <b>after</b> downsampling rather than before. Using Patrick's settings (125), I will say that Photoshop Bicubic & Smart Sharpen is somewhat better than Irfanview Lanczos & Sharpen. Photoshop Bicubic Sharper is worse than Irfanview.

<p>

USM threshold (~15) was extremely important for preventing further grain-up in blue skies, but instead of smoothing film grain, with digital cameras I often use the Gradient tool, or sometimes the sky actually appears as a color other than white (hurrah!) so threshold is not as important. Guidelines recommend against its use for film, but Smart Sharpen does seem to be an improvement for digital capture.

<p>

* Foveon and Fuji-EXR images do not benefit as much from downsampling as Bayer-pattern images.

Using a flash or lots of full spectrum light during capture is going to influence how far you go and the thickness of the halos when applying any sharpening to an image. I always get sharper images to start out with when using flash or any close to full spectrum lighting to the extent all is needed is a bit of USM and sometimes ACR's sharpening renders perfect sharpness without any halo's shooting Raw.

 

 

Where halo's come about in my experience is when the image is too soft from lens diffraction or inaccurate focus and has a noticeable amount of low contrast to start out with. In those instances no sharpening tool will work satisfactorily.

 

 

With no disrespect to Patrick I do think his continued use of the same professionally shot studio image to demonstrate how well HIS method works is not an accurate way to show how it will work on other images shot under different conditions outside a studio setting, use of a tripod and expensive light setup.

 

 

Wish he'ld provide a demo of his technique applied to one of his own images he shot hand held outdoors like the rest of us photo shlubs have to deal with.

<p>Tim, I was just in the process of formulating a similar response to Patrick when your most recent post in this thread arrived in my inbox. I agree completely with you. When one is trying to make the best of a lower quality image, which is what most of us are forced to do, there is NO way anyone could get good results out of any single set of sharpening parameters or method. Based on Ben G's vanilla / chocolate analogy post urging flexibility, I suspect he probably also feels the same way.</p>

<p>Patrick, your emphasis / insistence on SS with a radius of 1.1 px and method = lens blur strongly suggests to me, as it did to Tim, that you don't use the method and parameters you are suggesting on images in which (for whatever reason ... poor lens, camera movement, slight OOF, etc.) a point in the image gets mapped to anything other than a single, strongly peaked point-spread function. </p>

<p>Attempts to deconvolve messy PSFs, especially when caused by blur at multiple length scales, clearly requires flexibility in one's approach, and likely involves multiple sharpening steps with different settings. I can guarantee you that providing users such flexibility is precisely the reason that Adobe provided sliders and not a single fixed setting of r=1.1, etc. in SS (and their other sharpening tools). </p>

<p>Another example of why sharpening using a variety of methods is clearly necessary for most of photographers is the popularity of the recently introduced "clarity" slider. This is essentially a variant of classical sharpening using a radius in of several tens of pixels (on normal sized images). When Adobe introduced this tool, they didn't remove other sharpening tools such as USM (which is often used at much smaller radii). The reason is that the "clarity"slider helps with a low but broad PSF, while USM or SS at r~1 px helps with strongly peaked, symmetrical PSFs spread out over much smaller radii.</p>

<p>It's obvious that SS works well on some images, eg, the studio shots that Tim suggested. It's equally obvious that it can't possibly be the be-all and end-all of sharpening methods for all images, which is, I think, the impression you tend to give. </p>

<p>FYI, it is trivial to demonstrate the impossibility of universal applicability of any single sharpening method or set of parameters by using linear system theory and showing the uniqueness of the solution to most well-posed deconvolution problems.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Tim, the continued use of the same image is because;</p>

<p>1_it show the result perfectly.</p>

<p>2_and i didtn think i need to do more images to illustrate something that work well</p>

<p>But, you know me, ask and you shall receive ; ) You needed shot not in studio, not professionaly made, like the rest of us..where here they are LOL</p>

<p>Heres a first example of a shot i have done during my vacation in Mexico with a Olympus E20 years ago.</p>

<p>Im putting the original, the one with a highpass of 4 with softlight, and one with a smart sharpen of 250, 1.1, lens blur, box not checked. All the images i will post have the same exact setting of sharpen to show you that it could work. None have use any mask..i applied the effect all over the image, a bit strongly so you can see it.</p>

<p>Feel free to download them, and put them together in the same PSD dociument so you can clearly see the original, the highpass and the smart sharpen result... i think it the least you could do to appreciate the effect ; )</p>

<p>Of course, let me know what you think ; )</p>

 

<p>MEXICO_real de catorce ORIGINAL</p><div></div>

<p>MEXICO_real de catorce HIGHPASS</p><div></div>

<p>MEXICO_real de catorce SMARTSHARPEN</p><div></div>

<p>TORONTO_from the CN tower ORIGINAL</p><div></div>

<p>TORONTO_from the CN tower HIGHPASS</p><div></div>

<p>TORONTO_from the CN tower SMARTSHARPEN</p><div></div>

<p>PARIS_euro disney ORIGINAL</p><div></div>

<p>PARIS_euro disney HIGHPASS</p><div></div>

<p>PARIS_euro disney SMARTSHARPEN</p><div></div>

<p>PARIS_cimetiere pere lachaise ORIGINAL</p><div></div>