Motorsport Sharpening

[carr0t]

Hi All,

Just a quick question to see who sharpens their motorsport images? i have been having a look over my night time racing shots, and if i apply some basic sharpening to a few of the images they look much better. So i was thinking of setting up an action to auto sharpen a whole set of them taken at an event.

Just wondering if this might be a good idea? i usually have from a huge day at the track 1-2k of images, so i really don't have the time to manually update them individually, so i was thinking of creating an action to lightly sharpen them.

any thoughts on this? do any of you sharpen your images before you sell them? i am more refering to a batch sharpening, and not just special treatment for one individual image.

id like to hear your thoughts.

thanks.

[Cadwell]

As I shoot in RAW sharpening is pretty much mandatory. JPEG shooters mileage may vary depending on how they've got their camera set up for in-camera sharpening.

[carr0t]

ok thanks Cadwell for your reply. Do you apply a general light sharpening or you go through your images individually?

If so do you mind if i ask your settings you use for sharpening? I am looking at using the unsharp mask.

[Cadwell]

Stuff for my web site has a batch sharpening of 150%, Radius 0.3, Threshold 0 but the right values to use depend on the cameras you are using and the image size you want to display at. Those values work in general for a 1D Mark II/III RAW file with target display size of 1280x pixels.

[TMCCaptured]

subscribing

[Lowner]

I don't treat my motorsports images any differently to anything else. I always do the gentle "capture" sharpen plus whatever else the image needs.

I am becoming more selective about sharpening, I no longer do much blanket sharpening, instead I select parts of an image for treatment, often just "the focal point" in the image.

[Jamie Holladay]

Stuff for my web site has a batch sharpening of 150%, Radius 0.3, Threshold 0 but the right values to use depend on the cameras you are using and the image size you want to display at. Those values work in general for a 1D Mark II/III RAW file with target display size of 1280x pixels.
the only difference I have with Glenn is 300% radius

[Cadwell]

I find 300% fine for full sized images but too aggressive for the 1280x pixel images I stick on the web site.

[Jamie Holladay]

I find 300% fine for full sized images but too aggressive for the 1280x pixel images I stick on the web site.
true. That is what I do and then resize.

[micromoose]

Hi,
Thanks for the information so far but I have a question, bear with me though as it may be better placed in the post processing board.

I went to try this at home in Lightroom and quickly realised that the amount slider only goes up to 150 (or is it 125?) Seeing as how I would imagine PS and LR have the same or similar sharpening engines why are the scales different and how would an amount of 300 in PS translate to LR?

Thanks,
Chris

[Lowner]

LR and PS the same! Never in a million years. It's always surprised me that they come from the same company.

[micromoose]

LR and PS the same! Never in a million years. It's always surprised me that they come from the same company.


My point exactly! So how does a sharpening amount of 300 in PS correspond with LR. Both Adobe products you would have thought the engine for this app must be at least similar?

[JFP-Photography]

subscribing

2nd!

[John Thawley]

Final output should dictate the amount of sharpening you apply. Consider a web image is only 72 pixels per inch, too much sharping is going to show a jaggedness to the edges and a bit of "halo"... whereas a print pushed out a 300 pixels per inch can take a lot more sharpening... it's being distributed over more pixels.

In addition, sharpening should ALWAYS be the last adjustment applied to an image. So... I wouldn't recommend a batch or action that does them all.

I actually have presets (I use Aperture) created for different out put and even for different cameras.

Lastly, ALL images need sharpening or un-sharpen mask. I don't recommend bumping the sharpening settings in camera either. Again, since you don't know the final output.

[Ingsy]

I'm just trying a method that I read about a while ago regarding sharpening (this is an area of PP that I'm looking to learn more about before the start of the season by the way). It's using a High Pass sharpen and then an overlay layer blend, rather than an unsharp mask.

I've just tried it on a couple of images and seems to come out ok. Just wondered whether others have tried it and if there were any potential pitfalls to this method?

Thanks very much.

[Lowner]

Ingsy,

Sharpening can get highly complex and no single technique is right for everything. I use a plug-in sharpener that uses a lot of different techniques and groups them into actions. I believe a POTN member has produced similar actions available as free-downloads. Maybe someone here will give you a link.

[Ingsy]

Sounds like I've got a lot of reading up to do then!

Cheers Lowner.

[micromoose]

After a bit of reading up and messing around, I've found that the Landscapes Preset in LR works well as a first point for a lot of my shots.

[onesickpuppy]

For LR......here are the settings that I find works well for sharpening

Amount 75-90
Radius 1
Detail 65-75
Mask zoom into 100%.........hold alt key and move slider until you have 90% of just edges
if your doing people.....stay mostly just the opposite

[thumper 8]

Interesting thread.

As someone who does not use (and has never used) PS or LR, I find the whole discussion interesting. For the last few years I only shot jpeg due to an older, slow laptop with limited capacity, but I am going to get a new computer in the next month or two capable of running either PS or LR and handling RAW images.

I don't want to derail this thread, but assuming I want to do more than a quick crop w/ Canon utilities (as I'm doing now) any preference over LR or PS for 'image improvement'?

Thanks for any imput.

[Lowner]

Tony,

I use a very old PS7, the reality is any post processing software would probably do, the trick is to understand how to get the best from whatever software you have. There are even two freeware options; GIMP and Picassa.

[thumper 8]

Tony,

I use a very old PS7, the reality is any post processing software would probably do, the trick is to understand how to get the best from whatever software you have. There are even two freeware options; GIMP and Picassa.


Thanks Richard. I have used Picasa for quick one touch conversions to B & W and sepai etc, but the sharpening is less than impressive ~ used it a couple of times and never since.

I am leaning towards LR, but still weighing my options.

[micromoose]

I almost exclusively use LR, except when I want to be really creative. LR is so easy to use once you've learned it and is very powerful. I bought the Scott Kelby LR book which helped me hugely. PS is still the more powerful tool but I find it a bit overwhelming and packed full of features I don't need. I prefer the fact that LR is aimed squarely at photographers rather than graphic designers etc.

With a little bit of practise (I'm certainly no expert) you can take your RAW files to another level.

[dicky2988]

I almost exclusively use LR, except when I want to be really creative. LR is so easy to use once you've learned it and is very powerful. I bought the Scott Kelby LR book which helped me hugely. PS is still the more powerful tool but I find it a bit overwhelming and packed full of features I don't need. I prefer the fact that LR is aimed squarely at photographers rather than graphic designers etc.

With a little bit of practise (I'm certainly no expert) you can take your RAW files to another level.

do you have any examples of these? I have lighteoom and just getting to grips with it, but I feel I'm limited. More through my lack of knowlage with it though rather than LR limitations

[zennish]

do you have any examples of these? I have lightroom and just getting to grips with it, but I feel I'm limited. More through my lack of knowledge with it though rather than LR limitations

I highly recommend the Scott Kelby Lightroom book. His talks are very informative, but if you are really wanting to understand all the different things you can do with Lightroom. This is the way to go. I too use Lightroom primarily and then "edit in CS4" straight from Lightroom to PS when I want to do more work on specific images .

here is the link to the Kelby blog for more info on his book.

Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers (http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/2008/archives/1732)

[dicky2988]

Ordered is book last night :P

[kipper]

Try thread below, heavy going but some good info including links to some automatic sharpening actions for Photoshop, see lower link. Hope this is of use.

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=466333

http://news.deviantart.com/article/20250/

[philwillmedia]

Final output should dictate the amount of sharpening you apply. Consider a web image is only 72 pixels per inch, too much sharping is going to show a jaggedness to the edges and a bit of "halo"... whereas a print pushed out a 300 pixels per inch can take a lot more sharpening... it's being distributed over more pixels.

In addition, sharpening should ALWAYS be the last adjustment applied to an image. So... I wouldn't recommend a batch or action that does them all.

I actually have presets (I use Aperture) created for different out put and even for different cameras.

Lastly, ALL images need sharpening or un-sharpen mask. I don't recommend bumping the sharpening settings in camera either. Again, since you don't know the final output.

+ 1 to that.
Every image needs at least some amount of sharpening and each image is different.
I sharpen each image individually.