Sharpening Photos for Print

[BOUNCINGNRG]

Hey,

I'm about to order 500+ photos from holiday over the last two years. I see everywhare that i should sharpen everyphoto that comes out of my camera.

I've got PS CS3, do you think i should go through and sharpen every photo, or would there be a good setting to run a Batch on all 500 photos.

I'd be printing 6x4.

Cheers

[PhotosGuy]

If you must batch them, try USM 100 1.0 1 on a file & see how you like it. There are a LOT of threads on this, including info in the "Sticky"s. What do you consider sharp and how.... (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=422307)

[BOUNCINGNRG]

excuse my ignorance, but what is 'USM 100 1.0 1'?

[Anke]

It stands for the Unsharp Mask filter. The most widely used and probably best method of sharpening. The numbers are the three numbers you need to enter when you get into the dialog box.

[cledwards]

Thanks Bouncing & Anke that was good info, I am going to go play..LOl..

[agedbriar]

Hey,

I'm about to order 500+ photos from holiday over the last two years. I see everywhare that i should sharpen everyphoto that comes out of my camera.

I've got PS CS3, do you think i should go through and sharpen every photo, or would there be a good setting to run a Batch on all 500 photos.

I'd be printing 6x4.

Cheers

The necessity to sharpen every photo arises when you shoot RAW.

If you are shooting JPG, sharpening is done in-camera before the JPG file gets written to the memory card. The amount of sharpening applied depends on the camera setting for this parameter.

Therefore, if you were shooting JPG, you will need to run every picture through sharpening one more time only if in-camera sharpening was set too low. When you try to see if a second sharpening pass will improve your pictures, watch for bright halos to appear along sharp edges. When they become more than just barely visible at 100% magnification on screen, the sharpening has been overdone.

[JVolz]

What size are you going to print to?

If they were shot jpeg, modest in camera sharpening is usually more than sufficient for 4"x6" prints.

[Damo77]

If you are going to batch-sharpen your photos (and I wouldn't recommend it) I'd err on the side of caution with your settings. Better to under-sharpen than over-sharpen.

My advice is to batch the similar ISO shots together. That is, collect all your 100ISO shots into one folder, then open one and find USM settings that you like (eg 150,0.5,3). Apply that to the batch.

Then choose a different setting for your 200ISO shots (almost certainly a higher threshold setting eg 5-7).

The higher the ISO, the higher your threshold setting should be.

Please understand that this advice is very general. I prefer to sharpen each image on a case-by-case basis.

[tim]

Just turn up the sharpness slide in the raw converter, that might be all you need.

[BOUNCINGNRG]

What size are you going to print to?

If they were shot jpeg, modest in camera sharpening is usually more than sufficient for 4"x6" prints.

sorry, been afay for a day, i'll be printing 4.5 x6. I always shoot in Raw.

Cheers

[BOUNCINGNRG]

Just turn up the sharpness slide in the raw converter, that might be all you need.
so iit best do sharpen in Raw converter than PS?

[PhotosGuy]

so iit best do sharpen in Raw converter than PS? I do a small amount of default sharpening in conversion, & in PS I final sharpen, sometimes by selecting the important part of the image & just sharpening that. So I don't batch them.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v218/PhotosGuy/Raptors/Red-tailed-HawK_Zeus_0126.jpg?t=1198162530

[cosworth]

If you're printing 4x6, bump your DPI to 300 and sharpen with CS3 unsharp mask in 2 passes from RAW.

300,0.3,0
pass 2
15,100,0

From JPEG? Just do pass 2 and bump the dpi to 300.

For images with low shadow detail or bad dynamic range, skip pass 2 or brighten the shot a touch beforehand.

I've printed about 10,000 4x6 prints from jpeg and raw with a Sony UPD printer. Less is more is always a good rule. tim touched on that right away.

[Peter Pawinski]

If you are going to batch-sharpen your photos (and I wouldn't recommend it) I'd err on the side of caution with your settings. Better to under-sharpen than over-sharpen.

I agree, but it's awfully hard to gage (for me at any rate) what "oversharpened" is on screen. Since I've started really playing and learning about sharpening techniques I've discovered that everything looks horribly oversharpened on-screen at 100%, but looks great on an 8x10.

[BOUNCINGNRG]

cool, thanks.

[Bill Boehme]

When you sharpen for printing, the amount of sharpening should be greater than sharpening done for displaying on the screen and it will frequently look oversharpened on the screen -- the only way to judge proper sharpening for print is to judge the prints.

[Lester Wareham]

Hey,

I'm about to order 500+ photos from holiday over the last two years. I see everywhare that i should sharpen everyphoto that comes out of my camera.

I've got PS CS3, do you think i should go through and sharpen every photo, or would there be a good setting to run a Batch on all 500 photos.

I'd be printing 6x4.

Cheers

If you want to learn a structured way of sharpening, instead of working by trial and error as if it were a black art, you might want to read Real World Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2 - Bruce Fraser (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-World-Sharpening-Adobe-Photoshop/dp/0321449916/sr=1-3/qid=1170083010/ref=sr_1_3/202-8365077-8286259?ie=UTF8&s=books)

[BOUNCINGNRG]

I've seen some where on this forum people talking about sharpening certain parts of a photo, i.e eyes.

Does this mean you can select certain parts of a image and only sharpen the selected part? **
or does it mean sharpening the whole image but only looking at the part of the imagae you want to sharpen.

** if its this one, is there a tutorial around?

Cheers

[Lester Wareham]

I've seen some where on this forum people talking about sharpening certain parts of a photo, i.e eyes.

Does this mean you can select certain parts of a image and only sharpen the selected part? **
or does it mean sharpening the whole image but only looking at the part of the imagae you want to sharpen.

** if its this one, is there a tutorial around?

Cheers

Yes you can do this if your editor supports masked layers ideally.

If you read the book it will tell you all about this and a lot more.

[PhotosGuy]

Does this mean you can select certain parts of a image and only sharpen the selected part? **
or does it mean sharpening the whole image but only looking at the part of the imagae you want to sharpen. Yes, just try it. Select with a feather of maybe 30 pixels. Then apply the USM. You can see on your screen what's happening.
My usual method of selecting:
Selecting areas in PS. (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=39994)

[Lester Wareham]

BTW the reason for sharpening using layers is it is non-destructive, you can fine tune the amount of each stage of sharpening using the layer opacity slider.

[Bill Boehme]

I've seen some where on this forum people talking about sharpening certain parts of a photo, i.e eyes.

Does this mean you can select certain parts of a image and only sharpen the selected part? **
or does it mean sharpening the whole image but only looking at the part of the imagae you want to sharpen.

** if its this one, is there a tutorial around?

Cheers

Yes, it is the one that I highlighted in red (and a bit of the second part in a manner of speaking). In Photoshop. I create a duplicate layer and apply the sharpening to it while concentrating on the area of interest. I then add a mask to the layer and paint the rest of the layer transparent -- as one possible way of doing it. Finally, I tweak the transparency of the mask before flattening the layers.

[Bill Boehme]

There is a reasonably good book by Scott Kelby titled the "7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3" that covers the process through a series of "lessons". I am not exactly enamored by his cookbook style of presenting the material which is frequently a bit too thin on explanation of the "why" part of things, but he does at least show you the "how" part.

[BOUNCINGNRG]

Lots of great advise, thanks, i'll be getting that book as well. cheers