articles/Nature/verysharppractice-page6

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

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2010

Before and after sharpening

At the time of writing, this is looking like a topic that will run and run, we do not anticipate having seen the end of it yet! If you are bugged by a sense that you are not as sharp as you might be, start with the values from samples 5 or 6 in the table then print a few shots with opacities ranging from say 20% through to 80% and take a look at real, full-size prints.

Once you decide on some values, write an action and run with it for a period of time and see how you get on - modify only on the basis of looking at prints.

All that has been written on the previous pages has little bearing on preparing images for digitally projected competitions or website use. Here we defer to the work carried out by Italian professional wildlife photographer, Juza (see www.juzaphoto.com).

Juza keeps a website populated with images of superb technical quality, especially in regard to their sharpening. He also details his preferred workflow for creating web images. It is a two-stage process, stepping down from camera resolution to 2,400 pixels and then to 1,200 pixels with inter-stage Smart Sharpening.

We modified his methods in line with a desire to end up with a 1,400 pixel image for digital competition. We presharpened in RAW as before, then reduced the scale to 2,800 pixels using Bicubic Sharper as the interpolation method. We then sharpened using Smart Sharpen (see table) followed by another reduction to 1,400 pixels and a lower level of Smart Sharpen.

This was followed by a 'Save for Web' routine to create a JPEG file, tagged with an sRGB profile. This final file was then compared with a RAW pre-sharpened file that was scaled directly to 1,400 pixels using Bicubic Sharper. The screen grab below indicates the results - which were visible on the monitor, but might not show up in print.

• Very Sharp Practice page 1
  
• Very Sharp Practice page 2
  
• Very Sharp Practice page 3
  
• Very Sharp Practice page 4
  
• Very Sharp Practice page 5
  
• Very Sharp Practice page 6
  

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