s2-is Sharpening? Prints?

[bjordan]

Hi, I'm just getting started and have a couple questions about this pic:

http://i13.tinypic.com/4d4bww4.jpg
(resized and re-compressed)

#1 Sharpening. The inset is the full-sized image, and you can see the halo on the left side of the trunk. It looks to me like what you get when you over-sharpen a digital image. Is that what is happening? It shows up in the print and I don't like it because it makes the whole image look annoyingly "digital." If it is overly-agressive sharpening, I imagine it enhances noise too. Does anyone shoot with low-sharpening for this reason? Should I just stop worrying and learn to love digital?

#2 Prints. I'm sure this belongs in a different forum, but maybe the cats shooting compacts can better communicate to my n00bness. I had this one printed 8x10 at a photo house with none of their color correction services and it came out significantly darker than I expected. How can I make sure that what prints is close to what I see on the screen?

Thanks, and any other tips are welcome!

[MaxZoom]

Sharpening
Several people have commented on the normal sharpening on the S2/S3 being too high. I don't have that opinion but if you want to avoid the effect you see then reducing the in-camera sharpening will have the effect you desire however you will then need to apply PP to achieve critical sharpness for each of your photos. High contrast edges such as the one you highlight will show over shoot (the halo effect) in most cases. There are techniques in Photoshop and similar programs to achieve critical sharpness in details and minimising the high contrast edge problem.
If you frequently photograph high contrast subjects then you may need to have your camera set on lower in camera sharpenning and add PP to your workflow. As I said above I'm happy with the 'normal' setting.
Prints
Calibration of your monitor is the first step.
This forum and many places on the internet cover this topic. There are fancy solutions with software and hardware but I'm quite happy some of the simpler techniques using tone charts and adjusting brightness contrast and colour temperature. The prints I get from my printer and from print services (without colour correction) meet my expectation. BTW I did find some older CRT displays were just impossible to set right, there are so many brands and variations it is impossible to give a magic formula.

[Thomas S.]

Now I thought I have played around with every setting on my S3, but I have not so far come across anything to do with in camera sharpening (as far as I know). How is this changed in camera and how much difference is there really?

[dale500]

There are two ways to adjust the in camera sharpening. Both are covered on page 94 of the manual.

Dale

S2 IS

[Thomas S.]

Oh, OK found it. (pg 80 in the S3 manual). On the S3 there is no dedicated function, it is done through adjusting your custom colours. How much difference is there, and is it different from the S2?