STICKY:  Sharpening Tips & Tricks, Tutorials, and FAQ

You guys are bummin' me out.

Am I the only person here using nothing but DPP? (Okay I use Corel Photo House for the clone tool and Text, but that doesn't count)

Let me just throw a couple questions out there, regarding that program, then I'll go away:

1) For a RAW image, what are the differences in doing your sharpening in the RAW tab, as opposed to RGB?

2) (not really "sharpening", but aslong as I'm here) Under what conditions do you use "Linear" to adjust contrast?

Thanks,

Moose

LV Moose wrote in post #7171729
1) For a RAW image, what are the differences in doing your sharpening in the RAW tab, as opposed to RGB?

Nothing. Only the scale is different. The effect is cumulative.

LV Moose wrote in post #7171729
2) (not really "sharpening", but aslong as I'm here) Under what conditions do you use "Linear" to adjust contrast?

I never use it.
Here is a little explanation: Click

René Damkot wrote in post #7172480
I never use it.
Here is a little explanation: Click

Danke u.

I've used it once... to process the image of a full moon. Linear seemed to give me better detail.

My first exercise using USM (in Zoom Browser):
original

USM is a pretty poor method of sharpening, there are much better methods described in earlier pages of this thread.

Part 2

amount 300%, Radius 1.5, threshold 0

perryge wrote in post #7180292
USM is a pretty poor method of sharpening, there are much better methods described in earlier pages of this thread.

I'm sure. But I've gotta use what I've got. I don't have the capability to use layers, high-pass, edges, and such.

Yet.

You could download GIMP and get the sharpening toolkit, it's a free, open source Photoshop style piece of software.

perryge wrote in post #7180331
You could download GIMP and get the sharpening toolkit, it's a free, open source Photoshop style piece of software.

I've heard of that.
Right now I'm trying to decide whether to get PS Elements, or save up for the whole enchilada.

Maybe for now, GIMP would hold me over.

i've used both photoshop and gimp and they are very similar in what they can do. just don't fall prey to the idea that if it is free, it must not be as good as the bloated overpriced software that is photoshop.

Wow. I just downloaded GIMP...

Now all I have to do is figure out how to use it.

you can find a plethora of tutorials, plugins, brushes, scripts, etc. at:

http://www.gimp.org

you can google for other sites as well. there are also a ton of youtube tutorials that show you how to do stuff.

I just stumbled across this thread while doing a search for member feedback on Lightroom. All I can say at this point is "Wow!" Boy, do I have a lot to learn. I'm thinking at this point, after reading through this thread, that I can probably do without Lightroom, and get good results with what I have: PS7, PSP8, and Gimp. In addition to DPP, of course.

I have a question that's more or less on topic here, since it involves the first step of PP sharpening: I'm shooting in RAW mode, but having to export the images as TIF files because my old versions of s/w won't read Canon's CR2 images (and PS7 doesn't support the Adobe plug-in for this). Am I losing much by converting to TIF right off the bat?

Best,

Michael

as far as i know, tif is an uncompressed format, so you'd think you wouldn't lose much. from what i've read cr2 is basically canon's proprietary version of a tif file anyway. it's jpeg where you have to worry about losing something...

Hmmm.

Raw file is a "sort of" tif file, yet very different from what we call a tif file.

Simply put: It's the raw data of the sensor, not yet de-mosaicked (if I wrote that correct, the spell checker thought I did :lol . So not an RGB image.

That's why all camera "parameters" and WB can be set in the raw converter without any loss in IQ.

A tiff file has no lossy compression (unlike a jpg), but still, it's best to do any editing you can do in the raw converter there, before converting to whatever format.