articles/Nature/verysharppractice-page3

Very Sharp Practice - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2010

One viewer said that they could not detect any difference in a test matrix, whereupon we suggested they use the reading glasses they had suspended from their neck. What was interesting was the fact that this viewer did not seem to consider it important to wear their reading spectacles to complete the task, whereas we assumed that they would - in many ways both of us were at fault!

Judging sharpness can only be truly carried out on a print, for that is a tangible thing. A screen image is a variable, very evident if the same file is viewed on a number of different monitors. When carrying out the tests for this feature we had images which looked soft on the CRT but massively over-sharpened on the LCD alongside - the same image simply dragged across from one screen to the other.

This is an issue for digitally projected or screen-viewed competitions, over-sharpening is a common complaint from judges but under-sharpening also crops up quite regularly. Much of it is outside the control of the photographer!

As far as we can tell from a limited Google search nobody has done a correctly balanced trial to discover the 'preferred' amount of sharpening. We found a number of esoteric articles on Google Scholar but all requested money ($30 to find we had no interest in sharpening goofy images from outer space was unattractive) , so we decided to do one ourselves (admittedly a slightly flawed piece of experimental design, but an attempt all the same).

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