Re: USM second opinion I'm really just re-iterating bmoag..
Did you read *all the surrounding text* on those sharpening
recommendations? Are they all for a 100% display image? (one of them
might be..(O;) A 300 ppi print? A 200 ppi print? A 6"x4" print? A
24" x 36" print? Film scans or dslr images? To be viewed at what
distance?
Because the sharpening for all of these will be *different*, as bmoag
says. I work with film scans too, but I would never sharpen the scan
at full scan res, especially while it still displayed so much
grain/aliasing. At the size you have displayed it, that image would
print at about 5 feet wide! Is that realistic for the image? I
*always* downsample my filmscans to at least half (preferably one
third) of their original size, before even thinking about the
sharpening level I might apply. That way the aliasing (and other
optical issues) are smoothed/averaged/reduced, and sharpening can
effectively be applied to the 'real' image detail, rather than all the
'noise'. You will then get a far better feel for the settings - it
seemed like black magic to me at first, but I'm getting it now... By
the way, some of those settings you list are almost certainly designed
for specialised sharpening, eg using LAB mode layers, found edges,
multiple sharpening runs, etc..
And I don't think anything will, until you properly downsample and
clean up the image. Sorry!
Another issue here is that when you zoom the image, whether by browser
or image processing program or whatever, you are at the mercy of their
zooming algorithm, which is almost certainly not going to give you
results comparable to doing it properly. Investigate and compare the
results you get from different downsampling routines in Photoshop, and
compare them to the results from just zooming..!
When the image is very messy, like yours (sorry), I would use heavier
denoising first, maybe even a slight blur as well, then a simple
downsample to say one-third size. Then try sharpening... When the
image is pretty good - eg from a dslr, I use Lanczos downsampling (try
Irfanview), and then very lightly sharpen. (Lanczos seems to be the
best at holding detail without introducing artefacts - like jaggies
along diagonals.)
Sharpening is always the very last thing I do, just before I print or
post, and only when the image is at *exactly* the size I want, for the
resolution I wish to print or display it..
My sharpening settings would probably range between 50%-300% (usually
around 100%, and higher for printing), 0.3 to 3 pixels (0.3-1 for
display, 1-3 for high quality printing), 0-8 threshold (higher numbers
for noisier images). Display settings are usually very different to
those for best prints, and then they can also vary a lot depending on
image content.
Finally, the better you get at the entire process, the less you
need/want. (O;
Mark.thomas.7@gmail.com
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