People in Black & White: a discussion

[Skygod44]

To follow up I actually think this sharpening method was based on something which is discussed here
I'm sure in the years since this was written that methods for resizing and sharpening in Lightroom etc. have advanced to the point where much of this is un-necessary but to be honest it's such a quick and simple workflow for me and I've always appreciated the results.

An article from 2009, I see
With AI "magic erasing" now possible, I think that yes, things have progressed somewhat.
Though personally, the more things progress, the more I want to go back to an analogue life.

Catch you later, in the threads.
Simon

 

[paddler4]

To follow up I actually think this sharpening method was based on something which is discussed here
I'm sure in the years since this was written that methods for resizing and sharpening in Lightroom etc. have advanced to the point where much of this is un-necessary but to be honest it's such a quick and simple workflow for me and I've always appreciated the results.

Interesting. The source at the link is 16 years old, and the comparison is only to Photoshop USM sharpening, which I never use for sharpening (although I do use it for local contrast adjustments). Virtually all of my creative sharpening is now done with one of the three tools: Lightroom's sharpening, which has become quite good; Photoshop's Smart Sharpen; or a high-pass filter. I'd be interested in a comparison with those.

For output sharpening, I simply use Lightroom's built-in output sharpening, which I find is now excellent. A few years ago, I did test prints comparing LR's default output sharpening to otherwise identical prints using a couple of different Photoshop resizing methods, and LR was as good as the others, and far simpler.

For my purposes, it's the sharpness of prints that is the main consideration. One never knows how stuff posted on the web will appear at the viewer's end anyway--the size and resolution of the monitor, the amount of resizing done by the website, the color accuracy of the monitor, etc.

 

[stevejack]

Interesting. The source at the link is 16 years old, and the comparison is only to Photoshop USM sharpening, which I never use for sharpening (although I do use it for local contrast adjustments). Virtually all of my creative sharpening is now done with one of the three tools: Lightroom's sharpening, which has become quite good; Photoshop's Smart Sharpen; or a high-pass filter. I'd be interested in a comparison with those.

For output sharpening, I simply use Lightroom's built-in output sharpening, which I find is now excellent. A few years ago, I did test prints comparing LR's default output sharpening to otherwise identical prints using a couple of different Photoshop resizing methods, and LR was as good as the others, and far simpler.

For my purposes, it's the sharpness of prints that is the main consideration. One never knows how stuff posted on the web will appear at the viewer's end anyway--the size and resolution of the monitor, the amount of resizing done by the website, the color accuracy of the monitor, etc.

Agreed - and I think these days any of the above methods would get you to pretty much the same place.
I guess from my side, the only thing I can control is what I do at my end; so making sure the image is in the correct colour space and is sized and sharpened appropriately for either web or print.
And I'm not sure how much of an issue this is these days, but for example in previous years if you were uploading a large image to facebook with anything other than 2048px on the longest edge it would be resampled and much of the sharpness was lost. Outputting the correct size made a significant difference, probably less so these days.
It's always a moving target but just like we would ideally make sure a print looks good before handing it to someone to show off your work - we want to make sure you've done everything we can at our end to show our online files it in the best way possible.

A well structured photograph is still a good photograph whether the colours are slightly off, it's printed badly, slightly pixelated, whatever - none of it really matters in the end it's just down to our own tolerances really.

 

[paddler4]

I'm vastly fussier about prints than about posts. For posts, I just size the JPEG in the LR export box. I dither about its "sharpen for screen" option and often leave it off, since I have already edited the image on screen. For prints, on the other hand, I am very fussy, but I've found that the three sharpening methods I mentioned, along with local contrast (more on that in a sec) and the LR resizing and output sharpening options are generally excellent.

Re local contrast: I make a lot of use of the Lightroom "texture" slider, which is very much like sharpening but lower frequency (slightly coarser). The next step up, both lower frequency and coarser than texture, is the clarity slider, but that seems to mix in midtone contrast, and I find it heavy-handed. So, I use that very sparingly. For local contrast coarser than the texture slider, I use USM in Photoshop. (A good starting point is threshold 0, radius 50.) So I've come to think of sharpening and local contrast as different parts of one process.