Sharpening In Digital Photo Professional

[stephen_delear]

I've been shooting with a Rebel XSi with a 28-70 2.8L. At the default sharpen on Photo Professional (3) I was

beginning to worry if my lens needed to go into the shop. I've upped it to 5 when working with RAW files but I'm

seeing improvement all the way up to 10. I'm also seeing little jagglies at 10 that want to put my teeth on

edge. Should I even be trying to do this in photo professional or should I open up an image editing program (in

my case GIMP) and use an unsharpen mask on an outputted Tiff file? If so what settings should I be using?

[alan_green4]

you're probably over sharpening. you get jagglies when you over sharpen. worse than no sharpening at all. DPP does a fine job sharpening but any program will over sharpen with harsh results

[phyrpowr]

Stephen,

 

I'm (as is normal) too lazy to bone up on all the various things to do in all programs, so I've never shaprened in DPP, but I wouldn't anyway.

 

There will be no doubt a dissenting opinion, but the general consensus is to save sharpening for the last procedure, in PS or whatever your main editing program is (oh, GIMP, I see, sorry, don't know anything about that one)

 

I use Elements usually, PS7 sometimes, and sharpen my raw files to start at 300%, 0.3 radius, no threshold: does the trick about 90% of the time, minor adjustments from there. Higer amount/lower radius seems to the best ratio

[petemillis]

99.9% of the time, levels and curves and cropping and enlarging and final sharpening is all I ever do, and I do this always in Canon DPP.

[stephen_delear]

Well what sharpening setting are the other DPP users using. Obviously not 10 (where I'm getting jagglies), but what are folks default 3, 5, 7? I should probably be using GIMP for this but it's so nice to just make a couple small changes and convert straight to JPG, skipping the edit TIFF stage.

[petemillis]

Stephen, I don't have a "default" value for sharpening. I only sharpen as much as I need to in order to get it right for the final print size or the final displayed picture size. Sometimes it's just a little bit, and sometimes it's a little bit more.

[sarah_fox]

Stephen, The optimal settings depend a great deal on the degree of softness in the image. They vary especially by lens and focal length, but also by the degree of detail erosion from the editing that is done. I've not seen a good discussion of how to set the unsharp mask parameters. I imagine most people do it by trial and error, as I do, so as to achieve the desired effect in the final image. (Anyone have a good link to share?)

 

In general, I try to rely less on sharpening and more on good optics and technique. I agree with the assertion that sharpening should be the very last step, as all editing results in degradation of sharpness. In fact, sharpening itself diminishes the information content of the photo, which is why it shouldn't be done more than one time in the editing process.