Soft photos in CS2

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone could help me understand why my pictures look soft in Photoshop when I first open them up while they look much sharper and clearer in DIgital Photo Professional. I suppose it has something to do with how much "pre-sharpening" the program puts in the photos. However, having just bought a great new lens (the outrageously priced 85L 1.2), I have been disappointed to see my photos look soft in CS2.

Is there anything I should be doing differently? (Other than I suppose take better photos). I know the photos can be sharp (as they are in Digital Photo Professional). It would just be nice if they looked similar starting out in CS2.
Hope this question makes some sense.
Thanks,
Jonathan

Jonathan, I presume you're using RAW, which is generally not sharpened. Do you do your RAW conversions using DPP or using photoshop? I'm guessing photoshop, as I think DPP does more sharpening by default.

ACR can be told to do more sharpening, and apparently ACR 4.1 is a big advance in that area, but that's CS3 only. Do you know about the unsharp mask or the newer smart sharpening? That's been in photoshop for years and works well. I use USM rather than smart sharpening.

Is it possible that the sharpness difference is just a viewing size problem? Are you viewing at 100% (ie 1 image pixel = 1 screen pixel) in both applications?

Hi,
Thanks for you responses. When I open CS2 and Caera Raw, my images are at 15.5%. I assume this is why they look soft. When I enlarge them to 100%, they look unbelievably sharp. Can I make photoshop open the image at 100% without it becoming huge (and making it impossible to see the whole image)? Can you do this so that all the images will open this way? Or is this just not possible?
Also, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by raw converting- the book I have talks about batch re-naming (which I do), but I haven't been able to raw batch convert. (sorry, I'm pretty new to this photoshop thing).
Jonathan

jmbern wrote in post #3437156
Can I make photoshop open the image at 100% without it becoming huge?

I don't quite understand your question. As I said, 100% means one image pixel equals one screen pixel. The only way you can view the image at 100%, yet still see the whole image on screen, is if you have a very old 1 megapixel camera!

If your photos are razor sharp at 100%, that's all you need to worry about. Your outrageously-priced lens is doing a great job. Just be happy that you have such big, beautiful photos.

May I say, if you are still coming to terms with all aspects of Photoshop and digital post-processing, I'd recommend just shooting Jpeg for a while. Raw workflow is very confusing to begin with. Make yourself comfotable with everything else first - cropping, resizing, enhancing, printing, archiving, etc, etc, etc.