[The Quality Guru]

Eric, you've got some nice captures there. However, technically speaking, you need to sharpen most of those frames in photoshop to achieve the best results. Also, in-camera sharpening is usually a bad idea. For best quality, stick to sharpening only in photoshop. Pros who want maximmum quality will shoot in unsharpened RAW and do the rest in PS. AS for sharpening, there are so many different techniques for photoshop 7 and CS that I could hardly talk about all of them here. However, you can get great results just fooling around with the unsharp mask. If you would like some figures and ballpark settings, let me know. If you don't have photoshop, you must get it. I shoot film almost exclusively and I wouldn't be able to live without it, and I don't 'manipulate' or use any of its filters besides simple adjustments like color correcting and sharpening, but it's a must have. It is the standard!

For the photo buffs out there, I use a Voigtlander Bessa R2 rangefinder (very similar to a Leica M6/M7, takes Leica glass, and has no viewfinder flare) and I have a few Nikon manual focus bodies (the FE and F3) and lenses for each system. My passion is street and candid photography in the style of Henri Cartier Bresson and Winogrand.

I'll post the link to my portfolio tomorrow, hopefully. It's down right now for some reason

 

[eric343]

Regarding sharpening, I've found that I don't really like it other than a subtle application of Stephanovitch's technique described earlier. Sharpening seems to give the photos an 'etched' look...

Also, Mr. PD, I don't mind at all your thread hijacking -- in fact, since we're thinking about getting a DSLR, it's very nice. (We're thinking about the Nikon D100 or D70, as all our lenses are Nikon)

 

[eric343]

Quote:

Originally posted by dabeststax Example 1

Nice! I love the composition.

 

[Stephonovich]

Yeah, I've done extreme sharpening before just for the heck of it... it sucks. As does in-camera sharpening. Keep all camera settings at neutral

That being said, experiment with Unsharp Mask. I find going above 1.0 in Radius usually does bad things. The settings I'm using for general sharpening of photos are 100% Amount, 0.5 Radius, and 4 Threshold. This isn't going to blow you away, nor is it a magic fix, but on the other hand, it *can* be applied twice usually with no ill effects. Of course, you might as well just up the power in the first place... just make sure to fade Luminosity channel to avoid any possible artifacts.

(-:Stephonovich

 

[dabeststax]

Thanks Eric343!!

Regarding sharpening, I get good results with photoshops USM, you don't really notice the artifacts at printouts up to 6x8, and then if you are careful you won't notice them at sizes higher than that.

A good site to check out would be http://www.luminous-landscape.com/

He has some reviews of a couple of sharpening programs that do a good job. I hear that a program called Focal Blade does a good job. And if you are going to be sharpening photos you should probably also get a noise reduction program as photoshops despeckle is kind of crappy. I use Neat Image and get great results with it. The reason for using that is when you sharpen a file with noise often the noise will become more prominent as a result of the sharpen so you need to get rid of it first.