articles/Nature/verysharppractice-page4

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

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2010

Test 1

The first test was to pre-sharpen in Adobe Camera RAW - only. This is an attractive proposition for a busy photographer as the sharpening is applied once only and can be applied to all images in a set or folder. It has the advantage also of being reversible as it is applied to a RAW file. The workflow is akin to shooting JPEG and passing the files right off to press or to album printing. Martin Evening has published settings as shown below.

We took the 'detail' settings as being appropriate for the bird subject and applied them at progressively stronger and stronger values before making a composite print without performing any interpolation. This was then printed at 360ppi using 2880dpi, High Speed off and Max Detail on an Epson 3800 printer, ie the best conditions we could muster. The composite print was then presented to 50 photographers experienced at viewing prints, and they were asked to vote which was the 'most pleasing' level of sharpening.

In addition, the print set included a further group of images sharpened using the default 'detail' settings but with varying levels of Clarity applied in ACR

Only one out of the 50 went for the unsharpened image, the remainder went, in rising numbers, for the pre-sharpened values (without any Clarity), in rising order of strength. The highest vote was gained by values of 150 Amount, 1.5 Radius and 80 Detail. As the graph shows, the graph did not tip over into 'over-sharpened' territory, a flaw in the experiment.

We expected Clarity to influence the result because negative Clarity softens an image and positive Clarity seems to produce an apparent increase in sharpness - it increases mid-tone contrast. Our viewers were not fooled! Any amount of Clarity drew a few more votes over the baseline, but not a significant jump. This was unexpected, but statistics do not lie (really?).

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