Keeping sharp details in Photoshop

[jay_chartwell]

I'm photographing the fronts of greeting cards with the intent of publishing the

images on the web. I have a copystand-like setup and the greeting cards have

text included.

 

When resizing the images in Photoshop, the text doesn't hold up so well. It's

not like it's "out of focus" and it's not "the jaggies." I don't know the

technical term for it, but it's like the edges are not consistently

well-defined. The sharpening filter doesn't help. It just sharpens the

poorly-defined edges.

 

I've seen this in the past and I recall that reducing the size in multiples of

one-half corrected this (i.e. changing the size from 1000 px to 500 px). I tried

that as an experiment and sure enough, that holds true. The problem is the size

I need is not a multiple of one-half.

 

Any suggestions on how to maintain photographed text as sharply as possible?

[bernardwest]

Is it not an issue of contrast? If the text is black and white, I find that often the blacks are not fully black and the whites are not fully white. Bringing the sliders in in levels and painting the adjustment over the text might fix the problem.

 

The other issue is veiwing size. Are you viewing these in multiples of 25% (ie. 25, 50, 75, or 100%)? If not, edges can look strange on a monitor.

[colinsouthern]

It would be helpful if you could post an example.

[bill_tuthill]

The Lanczos filter in Irfanview (free) does a better job of

downsampling than bicubic or bicubic sharper in Photoshop.

That said, it would be better to avoid downsampling by taking

the original picture at target (web) resolution. Most digital cameras

allow you to reduce resolution.

[jay_chartwell]

Bernie wrote: "The other issue is veiwing size. Are you viewing these in multiples of 25% (ie. 25, 50, 75, or 100%)? If not, edges can look strange on a monitor."

 

Bernie, the effect I'm trying to describe is similar the non 25% viewing multiples of which you write. Before I respond to anyone else's comments, I am including a screen shot. The top text is relatively good while the bottom shows what I'm talking about.

[don_e]

"Any suggestions on how to maintain photographed text as sharply as possible?"

 

Jpeg is problematic for text, especially small text because of the anti-aliasing. The png or gif formats would do better.

[bernardwest]

Actually, what Don wrote is a very good point which the rest of us forgot to think about (although in my defence, i figured you had a picture on the card as well). I think your problem may be solved by using .PNG instead. Am I right in saying that a png is a vector image, and this is why it will scale better than a jpeg?

[don_e]

Png is a lot like tiff. The files are about a third smaller. It was designed as a free alternative to gif, but is not limited to the 256 colors of gif. The problem with jpeg is its lossiness, which is ok for photo images, but not so good for simpler graphics like text.

[don_e]

I just tested png and jpeg on text. Using a serif font at 24 pts and typed some alphabet with anti-aliasing turned on. Black text on white. Saved as jpeg, then saved as png. Closed and opened them. At magnification you can see the jpeg artifacts in the white background in the letters with several shades of light grey (for example inside the loop of a "b" or "o", while the png was clean. This gives the jpeg text a soft or fuzzy appearance compared to the png.

[jay_chartwell]

Okay, here's what I did (in Photoshop): I took the original jpeg image and cropped it then sized it down to the size I want. I saved a copy as jpeg. Then I took the original image and saved as png. Then I cropped and sized that one. I compared the two and could see very little difference in the text. Is there something I should have done differently?

 

Also, will a jpeg image degrade with repeated opening and closings even if no manipulation was done?

[don_e]

"Then I took the original image and saved as png...I compared the two and could see very little difference in the text. Is there something I should have done differently?"

 

Not have begun with a jpeg.

 

Saving it as a png is not going to magically do anything, just save what is in the jpeg. If you don't have a raw or tiff option in your camera you might consider scanning to tiff or to any file format that doesn't lossily compress the image.

[don_e]

Then you will have to post them to the www as either pngs or gifs, not jpeg. What you want to do is keep the lossy artifacting out of the workflow altogether.

[jay_chartwell]

So, are you saying I should set the camera to raw?

[don_e]

I'd give that a shot, yes; scanning might do better. I don't know what all this would look like, so I'm flying blind here (Are these cards text only or are there images and colors? What does the background of the text look like? I'm sure it is not like background white in Photoshop).

 

Not just the card's text, but the background to it, even if it is "white" is implicated in the jpeg compression. Resampling will introduce even more artifacting, as would sharpening. With text graphics or anything like it...charts, graphs...any lossy format will make a mess of them at small sizes. The text graphic will look better at its native size even if jpeg. Jpeg might look ok if not too small or too large.

[jay_chartwell]

I set my Nikon D70s to raw (NEF) and it would not open in Photoshop. Is there a way to open raw in Photoshop?