Smart Sharpen in PS CS2--magnification?

[timothy_nelson]

When I run Smart Sharpen on my iMac G4 (1 Gb RAM), I can view the preview of the

sharpening effect at any magnification, but when I run the actual sharpening (with progress

bar, etc.), I can only view the effect on screen at 100% or 66%. At lower magnification, the

view reverts to the unsharpened version. The file is indeed sharpened as seen in the 100%

view. It doesn't seem to be a memory limitation, since the same thing happens with files of

various sizes. I haven't seen any documentation of this issue--has anyone else experienced

this or does anyone know how to fix it?

[joseph_wisniewski]

You can't "fix" it, because it's not "broken". At lower magnification, you can't judge how sharp an image is (how can you spot "single pixel" detail, if every other pixel is averaged out?) so the sharpening is not displayed, to make things run much faster.

[timothy_nelson]

The preview of sharpening with either Smart Sharpen or USM gives a fairly good

representation of sharpness at lower magnification, and the screen display remains

sharpened at low magnification after applying USM. Try the same with Smart Sharpen/Lens

Blur--the screen display initially shows the filter effect on the Preview, but reverts back to

unsharpened display after the sharpening filter runs on the entire file. It's not an issue of

inaccuracy of single pixel radius at lower magnification (and anti-aliasing at low mag)--try

it with different radii. It may be a feature rather than a fault, as you say, but is this

documented? We are used to viewing USM at 25% or 50% as a fairly good representation of

the filter effect.