Sharpening in ACR

[DibblyDobbler]

Good evening Gents - some help needed please

When sharpening a RAW file in ACR - are there any rough guidelines as to how much you generally apply?

For my macro work I usually go for:

Amount = 50
Radius = 1.5
Detail = ?? (dunno just ignore this one usually )

But I'm never really very sure if this is enough (let's just assume the shot is correctly exposed etc so not much noise to worry about)

TIA for any replies

[Simpo Two]

You're supposed to look at the photo and see

Note that different image sizes will need different amounts of sharpening.

[DibblyDobbler]

oh - so it's a 'suck it and see' approach? No rule of thumb?

[Simpo Two]

Well, I use 'SIAS' - because that's how H. sapiens looks at photos - with his eyes. As long as my eyes are better than the person I'm trying to impress, all is well

[DibblyDobbler]

Fair enough, thanks

[Craikeybaby]

Isn't sharpening best left until you have resized the file for output?

[DavidY]

Mike this is what you need

http://petebridgwood.com/wp/2014/10/x-trans-sharpe...

[thebraketester]

Craikeybaby said:

Isn't sharpening best left until you have resized the file for output?

Was just going to say this exactly.

[DibblyDobbler]

Craikeybaby said:

Isn't sharpening best left until you have resized the file for output?

Honestly I have no idea - I don't even 'resize for output'!

I usually work on the RAW file in ACR (do some sharpening etc there), massacre it in photoshop, save it as max jpeg then upload to Flickr.

[DibblyDobbler]

DavidY said:

Mike this is what you need

http://petebridgwood.com/wp/2014/10/x-trans-sharpe...

Oh that looks interesting! Thanks David - will have a proper read later

[thebraketester]

If you are uploading to flickr, then I would reduce the files down to 1024 on the long side and sharpen. No point in uploading max res files (unless you specifically need to)

[RobDickinson]

Craikeybaby said:

Isn't sharpening best left until you have resized the file for output?

Often people do it twice.

There is 'input sharpening' you apply to the raw file as you convert. This gets you a minimum amount of sharpening to bring out some detail at the full file size.

Then there is 'output sharpening' which depends on where it is going (print/web) and finished size.

Theres many other variables too, fine detail needs different sharpening than coarse, sometimes you can end up using different amounts for different areas of the image.

[Simpo Two]

thebraketester said:

If you are uploading to flickr, then I would reduce the files down to 1024 on the long side and sharpen. No point in uploading max res files (unless you specifically need to)

Indeed, no point uploading 10Mb when 400Kb will look just as good and possibly avoid any auto resizing/compression that can wreck an image.

[RobDickinson]

Some people do use flickr as a full sized image store and you can restrict access to those so no one else can get them.

I often dont do any output sharpening for online, just use a bicubic sharper downsampling in photoshop to 1200px wide/high this tends to add enough, if not I use smart sharpen