articles/Landscape/Kintyre-page3

Mulling Around Kintyre - part 3 of 1 2 3 4

by Paul Gallagher Published 01/04/2014

Adobe CC Smart Sharpen

Much has been made of the new sharpening features of Adobe Photoshop CC. Having watched the promotional video twice we were no nearer to understanding whether it was better or worse; a 6-inch, moving screen view is no way to make even the roughest assessment of sharpening. In any case the hype was more obsessed with correcting camera shake (we're pros for goodness sake, we don't have camera shake :\)) ). On a parallel video by an Adobe product manager, the presenter was whizzing the sliders about in a highly unconvincing manner while making the right sorts of noises - at no stage was making a print mentioned!

Our next port of call was Martin Evening's book Photoshop CC for Photographers. Martin has been (and to some extent still is) sceptical about Smart Sharpening and he too found the turgid response of the method to be irritating. Smart Sharpen certainly grinds pixels!

For our part, we set up a triple screen view, one with our legacy ring around on the maximum acceptable levels, one for Smart sharpening and the original. We found the Smart Sharpen to be reasonably easy to adjust, ie it was quite insensitive. We could not quite reproduce the legacy effect; in most cases the Smart Sharpen was delivering enhanced highlights we would have preferred left untouched (even with the Tonal Width slider at 100%). Because we were using a 'Smart Filter', we had the option of fading the effect back and it also allowed us the use of opacity filters and layer masks. Overall, though, we failed to convince ourselves that the method had any advantages. There is an obvious lack of advice on settings even for a start and such are the options you could invest a lot of time with little to show for it. Nevertheless it did get the job done although it was slow.

• Mulling Around Kintyre page 1
  
• Mulling Around Kintyre page 2
  
• Mulling Around Kintyre page 3
  
• Mulling Around Kintyre page 4
  

There are 37 days to get ready for The Societies of Photographers Convention and Trade Show at The Novotel London West, Hammersmith ...
which starts on Wednesday 17th January 2024