A very strange question on sharpening... But someone here should know the answer

A few days ago, I was working with my VSCO Film presets to emulate some film looks on a series I had shot, when I had to watch the tutorial video for the 04 Slide film emulations. The narrator said something that threw me off and I absolutely could not find an answer to the following question after 20 minutes of searching:

How did print labs sharpen film back in the days before digital.

I am fully aware that digital seems to look sharper than film images that I've seen of family wedding photos and old portraits. But it got me wondering, how DID professional print labs sharpen the images before we had "smart sharpen".

Does anybody know?

I can only speak for myself but back in the day we just got as sharp as possible SOOC and didn't worry as much about pixel peeping. We printed and made sure to look at prints at the proper viewing distance. Of course 35mm I never found as forgiving with sharpness as medium or large format. I also don't think you see the same prevalence of super thin DOF either as you do nowadays either.

flowrider wrote in post #17032698
I can only speak for myself but back in the day we just got as sharp as possible SOOC and didn't worry as much about pixel peeping. We printed and made sure to look at prints at the proper viewing distance. Of course 35mm I never found as forgiving with sharpness as medium or large format. I also don't think you see the same prevalence of super thin DOF either as you do nowadays either.

Right! I have been in a darkroom before. And I was taught how to burn and dodge my images with the enlarger machine using the little paddle and the big card with a hole in it. But nobody ever taught me how to sharpen an image.

(just to bring back some fun memories, look at the link below!)

http://staff.drewloker​.com/dodgeburn.htm

The general answer is that home darkroom hobbiests and consumer level photo labs didn't sharpen and and professional labs would charge big bucks to use an Unsharp Mask (the source of the name of the digital filter). Because the process was fiddly, if given 35 mm. film they would copy it first to larger sized sheet film. For a description of doing USM at home, see this: http://www.largeformat​photography.info/unsha​rp/

tzalman wrote in post #17032790
The general answer is that home darkroom hobbiests and consumer level photo labs didn't sharpen and and professional labs would charge big bucks to use an Unsharp Mask (the source of the name of the digital filter). Because the process was fiddly, if given 35 mm. film they would copy it first to larger sized sheet film. For a description of doing USM at home, see this: http://www.largeformat​photography.info/unsha​rp/

This is becoming lost knowledge... Half of the links on that page were Error 404 dead links.

Thanks for the answer.

Generally you could increase the perception of sharpness through increased contrast and higher density (print down a bit). I had the opposite problem once. A client wanted a portrait from an image in a newspaper. Newspaper photos are created using a screen that would produce a dot pattern. We copied the photo and then threw it slightly out of focus when printing in order to merge the dots together. Turned out pretty well considering what we had to work with.

CRCchemist wrote in post #17032690
A few days ago, I was working with my VSCO Film presets to emulate some film looks on a series I had shot, when I had to watch the tutorial video for the 04 Slide film emulations. The narrator said something that threw me off and I absolutely could not find an answer to the following question after 20 minutes of searching:

How did print labs sharpen film back in the days before digital.

I am fully aware that digital seems to look sharper than film images that I've seen of family wedding photos and old portraits. But it got me wondering, how DID professional print labs sharpen the images before we had "smart sharpen".

Does anybody know?

In most cases, sharpness was manipulated during the film development process, especially with small formats where unsharp masking was difficult or cost-prohibitive. This was done by using development techniques and chemicals that controlled the "acutance" of an image, mainly via the "edge/adjacency effect" (an effect obtained by processing the film so the developer becomes partially exhausted at high contrast borders, thus exaggerating them).

Perceived sharpness could be increased by:

1) using a high-acutance developer (e.g. Rodinal), instead of a developer that contains sodium sulfite (e.g. D-76), which partially dissolves the silver particles to reduce the appearance of grain;

2) Increasing the dilution of the developer, e.g. using Rodinal at 1:100 instead of 1:50

3) Reducing the frequency of agitation.

moose10101 wrote in post #17033568
In most cases, sharpness was manipulated during the film development process, especially with small formats where unsharp masking was difficult or cost-prohibitive. This was done by using development techniques and chemicals that controlled the "acutance" of an image, mainly via the "edge/adjacency effect" (an effect obtained by processing the film so the developer becomes partially exhausted at high contrast borders, thus exaggerating them).

Perceived sharpness could be increased by:

1) using a high-acutance developer (e.g. Rodinal), instead of a developer that contains sodium sulfite (e.g. D-76), which partially dissolves the silver particles to reduce the appearance of grain;

2) Increasing the dilution of the developer, e.g. using Rodinal at 1:100 instead of 1:50

3) Reducing the frequency of agitation.

Panatomic X and one-shot dilute Rodinal. A golden memory.

tzalman wrote in post #17033599
Panatomic X and one-shot dilute Rodinal. A golden memory.

I still have a few dozen rolls of APX-25, and a 500ml bottle of Rodinal.

I have one roll of Panatomic-X that I just got this weekend in a box of other stuff. I can't wait to use it, just having a hard time deciding which camera to put it in. Unfortunately, it'll be developed in HC-110, as I don't have Rodinal.

Once the film is processed the images can not be sharpened (at negative or positive level). What can help a tad with sharpening during film processing are high acutance developers. For B/W developers like Ilford Hyfin and Kodak Microdol were considered high acutance developers.

What these developers do is increase the micro contrast between blacks and whites so in effect there is a 'perceived' increase in sharpness. The downsize is they can also increase grain.