sharpening.. how much

[dashboardgyno]

how often do you all sharpen your photos.. does everyone get a little bit..?? The reason I ask, is I picked up my panoramic yesterday, (18 inches long) and the guy asked me if I added any sharpening.. I answered now, and he looked at my picture, and said.. yeah I am sure we could "tighten it up a little bit" I thought the picture looked fine....How often do you sharpen your photo's... and how much..

[slipe]

Most "experts" feel that most digital photos need a little sharpening. I don't put myself in that category, but I usually sharpen a little.

There are sophisticated techniques I sometimes use that can sharpen without making the picture garish. Look up some sharpening tutorials for whatever image editor you are using.

Sometimes I use a little unsharp mask when I don't feel like too much work. I use a very small radius and not a large amount when I do that. Radius varies with image size. I can use as little as 1 and as much as 4, but I rarely go that high. I think a good starting point might be radius 1.5 and amount around 40.

There are some excellent sharpening programs that do a nice job. I have a little program called Sharp Control which is very good, but unfortunately it doesn't work as a plug-in. One of the people who regularly post on Steve's and goes by gmitchel has written an excellent script for Photoshop with a great PDF manual to go with it. If you have Photoshop you might look at his free script. It is quite sophisticated and I haven't come near mastering it yet. I find the defaults give me a little more sharpening than I like, so I am going to have to spend some time in the manual. http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/...ingToolkit.htm

[BillDrew]

dashboardgyno wrote:

... he looked at my picture, and said.. yeah I am sure we could "tighten it up a little bit" I thought the picture looked fine ...

The corrrect amount of sharpening is in good part in the eye of the beholder. Try some different amounts and take a look at them - printed. To keep the cost down, crop out a 4x6"piece of your pano while you experiment.

With the unsharpen mask, I usually crank the percentage up to the max, vary the radius to just below the point where artifacts show up, then vary the threshold to just below the point where it seems to start "blurring", then back off the percentage.

I often come to about the settings Slipe mentioned.

Keep in mind that your camera likely has a sharpness setting - what you do in post processing will depend a great deal on where that is set.