Sharpening Technique / Raw

[dennykyser]

How and when do you guys sharpen? When shooting raw do you sharpen in Raw conversion at all or only with unsharp mask?? Or do you do both. I would like some technique help. I am using 10D and Photoshop CS

[ohenry]

Sharpening is a destructive process to your image and should be one of the final stages of your workflow. It is also dependent on image size and cropping which also suggests that it should follow those changes. Others disagree with my thoughts and add a moderate amount of sharpening during the conversion process and final sharpening after PSP adjustments.

Personally, I save my master files after adding adjustments but before resizing and sharpening as my master edited file. Then when I want to print or display an image, I open the master, resize it to the desired size, change to sRGB and set to 72 dpi if displaying on website, then sharpen and save that file as a separate file from the master.

I like to use Unsharp mask on the luminosity channel or FM's Intellisharpen for most of my sharpening. I also make a duplicate layer to do my sharpening so that I can always back make corrections if I'm not satisfied with the results without having to worry about having changed the original layer.

It might not be the ideal method, but that's the way I do things :lol:

[4walls]

I agree. Wait until the end then do any sharpening you are going to do
then.

I use PS's USM then I use FADE UNSHARP MASK, change the mode to
LUMINOSITY and enter a value between 80-100%. This helps to reduce
any halo effect in the sharpening process.

I usually have the USM set around 100-200%, radius 0.3-0.7, and
threshold 0-5 (5 if there are a lot of skin tones, 0 if there are none).

[Jesper]

It seems that almost everyone agrees that sharpening should be done as the last thing in working with your image, i.e. do it as the last thing before you print the image, after doing all other any other processing, for example.

There are many techniques to do sharpening. My favourite is this one: Sharpening with Style (http://www.shutterfreaks.com/Tips/joukosharpening.html). I've downloaded the script for Photoshop CS.

Here is another page with lots of links, it also has a number of links to articles about sharpening: Photographic Links (http://www.frontiernet.net/~mpkirby/Photography.html)