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Sharpening in Adobe Camera Raw

The other thing that I didn't do yesterday when it came up was this idea of the details tab and sharpening and so let's go ahead and do that and I think for that will use this image here and we'll come up here and we'll do a little crop because this story is definitely all about this chicago little watchtower here making sure I'm at a hundred percent so I can actually see what we're working on here and we're talking about the detail tab and sharpening first off there's three types of sharpening that you may want to do tow an image what's notice input sharpening, targeted sharpening and output sharpening the input sharpening is trying to compensate for the fact that these images are intentionally blurred every time you bring them in because basically you have these three shades of color red, green and blue that are making up your image just like in the olden days if you only had a red yellow and blue set of crayons you wanted to get a green you'd have to mix your yellow in your balloon ...

you'd have to overlap them you'd have to push them together to create another color part of the process of creating a full color image is what's known as this deimos aching taking the red green and blue shades from your sensor inside your camera and then mushing or blurring them together to create the impression of full color image obviously, we still only have red, green and blue colors when we make up the image there also mushed together when they come into photo shop, but this deimos aching process, in a sense, is purposely blurring every single one of your shots, even though you spent ten million dollars on the best piece of lens glass that you ever could imagine to make these super sharp images, and you've got a twelve zillion megapixel camera, and they're always being blurred. The great thing is, is that it's very actually easy to get back to the detail that was inherent in the file? In other words, compensate for this deimos aching process of going from sensor data into pixels by sharpening that's to say, if you're not sharpening all your images, you are losing out on a huge amount of information that's there. So you always have to do this input sharpening, which is basically getting you backto the actual sharp image that you wanted to capture. When you press the shutter, you're compensating for the demons aching process. The other type of sharpening is a targeted sharpening and that's for story telling that is, if you want to go in and actually sharpen the eyelashes on the model or something else like that, you are purposely going in there to exaggerate sharpening, and I'll even put clarity into this. Into this equation, and I'll even put that anti sharpening into the equation that we just showed with that new radio filter. Basically, you're using sharpness and blurriness to help story to help your story, you're exaggerating the detail in the file to draw the eye to where you wanted to go, and you're also minimizing that sharpening by using something like blurring. So that sort of targeted, sharpening, blurring it's for storytelling purposes, you do have to be really careful with targeted sharpening, and I'm very, very cautious to it. I rarely put sharpening into a brush that same place where we just found that anti sharpening I rarely put into it because that sharpening is at a pixel level, and that will actually change the structure of the pixels in the image, and that can leave artifacts. In other words, it's it has an unnatural appearance to it, but why? One thing is sharper. One one portion of the image has sharper pixels than another one depend upon the resolution that you're printing at. Sometimes you can get away with it, be cautious with it, that's also, why I if you remember, when I do blurring, I'm going to add grain to it again, make sure that these blurred, buttery soft portions of the image and the regular portions of the image match by adding a little film grain. That's again I'm trying to compensate for the fact of having different grain structures in the file and I don't want that and the third part is output sharpening and that is to going to compensate for your printing method and getting into sharp as possible as an example if you're printing out to watercolor paper or a gallery ramp a traditional canvas watercolor paper being more of a nun coded stock is going to have a bit of what's known as a dot gain especially if you're going to an inkjet printer that's goingto that spurt of ink is going to hit that paper and spread a little bit and that dot game is going to soften the file so you going to compensate by that by over sharpening you can get away with more sharpening goingto watercolor paper because of the dot game um same thing happens on press you have to be careful about press and how far you can push sharpening if you're going to offset lithography in other words, you're printing in tow a magazine or a poster or something the same thing goes with a gallery ramp you can sharpen a lot more going out to a gallery up not because there's dot game but because you've got the irregular surface texture of the canvas which hides pixels and refuses the light you actually want to sharpen it mohr to compensate for the fact that the image will be somewhat softer by the fact that you're putting on such a heavily textured stock, the opposite is true. If you're going out to a coded stock, a traditional glossy piece of paper or one of the metallic prince either metallic paper or an actual print onto metal kodak has its metallic papers they endure which are just beautiful. They're so glassy such a high gloss that the dot of the either inkjet or the actual resolution of a traditional photographic print is riding right on top. Every single pixel can be seen. And so you want to be very, very cost conscious without put sharpening going out to a coded stock or a metallic stock. Because there's no hiding it, you see every single pixel, and because of that, you need much less sharpening. So that's output sharpening and that's also something you need to take into account that question. I kind of see that let's. First do the tango on this thing. I'm gonna mention the question, jack, but this is probably the area I struggle with. More of my files in any other is there seems to be so many conflicting opinions on how far to push sharpening. You know, should you know I only goat? Two twenty five or thirty on your slider I mean there's just an area that it's it's a challenge to know how far to push it you know, my eye likes really detailed really sharp images my customers go well that looks kind of fake e or where you go to print it and it doesn't look good so yeah it's a really challenging area uh it is and again part of that is personal taste so that's an interesting thing that your client normally the client would be the one saying well, could you look you know could you push it? Could you you know, do something a little bit more with it so I'm with you obviously I've got that uh I do like pushing things and so let me go and I needed to change it and do a little bit of my tango on it toe tell this story here later on we'll actually dark in this over here. Um so how far you push it? It really is almost one of those blue state, red state you no questions one of those religious preferences because people can get so um they just have a very specific way of wanting to work with their image and how much detail is good and how much detail becomes a bit of a bug rather than a feature so as you can see here in terms of pushing it you know I have no problems pushing yes does that look natural? No, we'll compensate for that a little bit okay, so experimenting with our image but I did need to come up here and just do a little bit more because you should do your tango prior to doing your sharpening. It is the reason why it's not the first thing that I do because I want to push it I want to know how much clarity I'm going to go in there. I want to see how much pixel detail I want to see my special effects because until then you really can't tell what you're going to what you're gonna need to do in terms of sharpening or how you may have to be really cautious in terms of the effects the fact that I am pulling out that much shadow detail on this image between my before and after until I do that kind of resuscitation, I'm not going to know what kind of specifically noise reduction I'm going to be able to get away with also I'm not going to be able to know how much chromatic aberration I made to get it get away with so yes so let's go back to this, develop the detail tab and talk why um it's such an important topic and why there's a bit of a conundrum to it in terms of how far you can do it specifically understanding especially when it gets to that output sharpening how you're going to compensate for different media types also the viewing distance okay a magazine is viewed like this you know, a print in the gallery is viewed like this a billboard is going be printed from, you know, a quarter mile away you know that you're seeing a lot of large format prints now being done for marketing purposes on the sides of walls and things like that giant you know, these huge, you know, sticker prints that are put everywhere so there's a huge range of options in terms of printing these days each one of those is going to have a different set of sharpening options at their disposal it also is going to depend upon your original so let's go into it right now and talk specifically about these settings and you're going to see that I'm going to have my own opinion about it and another person could teach this class and have a radically different view of this of course my opinion is correct and there's this wrong so it makes it very simple you know? You just listen to me and ignore everybody else these in action being completely facetious because there are way too many phenomenal people that different opinions about sharpening that I'm not going to ever tried them for their opinion these are the default settings amount twenty five radius one detail twenty five masking what are these parameters? The amount is an intensity slider and is how much sharpening is going to take place. The nice thing to know about sharpening in adobe kamerad is because you became a raw uses this basic variation on the lab color space it on ly sharpens the luminosity of a file, not the color components if you were doing really, really great hyeon sharpening in photo shop in the olden days, you would convert the file into the lab color space on ly sharpen the lab channel in the channels palate converted back into rgb that way there's no chance of you getting artifacts of sharpening both the red to green in the blue and getting these potential little color french and going on so as a default sharpening in double camera is on ly luminosity sharpening so as a default it's better than anything in photoshopped, the default here is better also, this shopping tab is not input a shop except for the new adobe camera, which is a filter so again excellent not only is it faster, quicker, easier, better in adobe camera wrong, faster, quicker, quicker, easier, it's also often better just I just want to emphasize that to some things well, yeah, but you're cheating a real person goes into photoshopped no real person doesn't go into photo shop it's not that riel people real pros going to photo shop and do it with curves because that's how grandpa did it and you know we used curves and if you can't do it with curves is not worth doing and damn it, we do it in the snow backwards twenty miles every day and we enjoyed it. So anyway, that is the amount slider it's on ly to the luminosity. I'll show you in a sec and you can kind of preview that component of it radius you think of it is the sphere of influence it's the area that's going to be sharpened and it is being measured in pixels and basically what you want to remember in terms of radius if your image is already sharpe, then you're going to sharp it at a pixel or even below a pixel you can go down and do what's known as a sub pixels sharpening. Okay? And the nice thing about that is there is no chance of you getting any fringing going on because you're actually doing it less than entire pixel. So if your image is already sharp, if you've got great glass great camera working on a tripod, then you want it work below uh uh individual pixel if your image is somewhat soft for whatever reason camera, shake, motion blur, whatever just a softer camera not as good a piece of glass then your ability to go above that and actually what you're going to do is take what is bigger than a pixel that edge which is not a pixel and you're goingto do you're sharpening based upon that. So if your actual edge is more than a pixel and being able to go up to a maximum of three is actually a great thing, you also may want to use an increase radius if you are doing those billboards or posters, possibly even for things like a gallery rap because you're almost doing a little clarity, you can almost do a little bit of a clarity to it by exaggerating that radius be very cautious though, because at three pixels you can end up with seeing some actual fringing of those pics alleges it's not like clarity, which is actually a very large radius in the file. Nor is it like unsure masking photo shop where you can take that radio up to hundreds to really hide that when you do a on sharp mask and put a shop, you're basically at a very high setting you khun do what's known as a local area loca local contrast enhancement and l c e adjustment it's kind of like the high pass filter there's different ways of doing this exaggerated edge effect and put a shop and you can't really do that in here because they purposely we stopped it at three to make sure that people don't get carried away, ok, so depending upon your image below, a pixel of its already sharp above a pixel, if it's somewhat soft detail is the amount of contrast within that radius and that is at a pixel level and that's going that by putting in detail it's exaggerating the contrast of the pixels within that radius, which is really hard. Yeah, exactly it's like what? How um and I'll show it to you and you'll see exactly what it means. The basic upside of it is that detail you can get away with it if you're doing things like landscapes because it does bring in a lot of detail, but because it's at a pixel level, it is that's something I'm very cautious of on a portrait because it's going to exaggerate every pore, every piece of noise, everything else in the file. So I do not use detail in any significant way in twenty five I think as a default is way too large for a general detail, especially if you're working on portrait. I just I think that is more than you then you should be using so it's the contrast within the radius and you'll see in a second what that means masking is great because masking is his where this entire set of sharpening takes place and it's a little bit like threshold in on sharp masking photoshopped but it's actually better it's actually going to make a real mask and say I'm on ly going to sharpen on the edges and the slider is what constitutes an edge so again it allows you to find tune that sharpening and minimize things like sharpening the noise in the file subtleties in the file, the pores and skin structure so you can actually get away with a much higher amount if you understand detail and masking so I'll use much less detail mask a lot, but I can use a much higher amount than most people because I'm isolating it from the subtleties in the file. So that's, where I differ from some other people so let's do this first off the amount if I take it all of these sliders have a little preview option I hold down the option key on the mac or the old key on the pc, you'll notice that it becomes a black and white image and that's basically telling me that it is on ly sharpening the luminosity no color artifacts doesn't have a whole lot to do with it. If I take off the option, you know you're seeing the basically the same thing but that's what it's telling you this is actually all things considered is a pretty sharp file it's a little little bit soft but what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this amount all the way up to one hundred fifty more than I'm going to use, but that allows me to see the sharpening if I have this at a subtle thing like twenty five I'll never see what these other sliders d'oh so this is a basic concept and put a shop, exaggerate the effect, change your parameters and then fine tune the amount because if you keep it at a subtle amount, you'll never see what all the other sliders they're doing. So this is a global concept in photo shop and a doe became around like women everything you're working on something like this exaggerate the amount an example of this is the hdr adjustment within photo shop, which is a cool kind of cool adjustment exaggerate the amount see the sliders you'll see the radius, you'll see everything and then find two in the amount when you're done okay, so I'm going to exaggerate this amount, especially for teaching purposes, and because of our monitor projecting this out to tv, I'm going to zoom up even more so then one hundred percent I'm gonna be a two hundred percent, so hopefully the people in tv land can see what we're doing okay, so I've got an exaggerated amount and here it is at zero here it is all the way up radius I'm going to do that same thing. I'm going to hold down the option king on the mac all can the pc and you can see the radius that sphere of influence for the file. Okay, so you can see that it's coming down in this place half of a pixel in this case, it's exaggerating that halo and taking it way up, I'm going to take that way up. You're going to see if you can see that artifact going on right now I'm gonna come back to that in a sec because I want to have that large radius so you can see the detail tab and the detail tab of we take it up. Is that contrast within the what's being sharpened so you can see it's affecting it at a pixel level, bringing in a huge amount of detail and completely mucking up the file if you have a lot of texture, if we go in here, you might be able to hide some of that detail where you've got a bunch of texture, like in a landscape, but it's going to be really hard to hide that in any subtleties like a portrait. So again, if I take that down, you'll notice that I can have it just it maybe you know, below ten bringing in some detail I'm not exaggerating the noise be very cautious with detail masking coming up here at zero it's sharpening every single thing in the file you're used to a layer mask and photo shop if it starts off white, everything is being seen as I dragged this over, you'll notice it's now taking it out of the subtleties and on lee going to be sharpening that edge effect. So even if I do use detail at this point, there's no way that I'm gonna be sharpening the noise in the background if I've got a high mask nazi, you see that it is here it is without that mask there's that background there it is with the mask, you can see that I'm still affecting with that exaggerated detail, which I'm not going to keep but just to show it to you that masking how it's taking it out of the subtleties and the clock face and in the sky leaving it in these areas that you can see by holding down the options are all k okay? So by isolating it just to those edges and again in this case being very cautious with it, um I can do a huge amount of sharpening, okay without worrying about excessive noise. Now that radius like I said, I'm exaggerating that for the teaching purposes I'm going to take that bounce back down to a more manageable level, I'm really I'm going to be cautious for that edge in fact, especially if I'm working on a low res file if I don't have the pixels per inch which is another discussion we're going to get into how many pixels per inch do you need this idea down here this p p I what should you have for your filing that also relates to your output what you're printing too totally different numbers based upon what you're going to an encoded stock, a piece of canvas or a piece of coded glossy stock or metal that's why it's a totally appropriate a topic to bring up in here with sharp ernie? Because thes actually that number of pixels you have to hide things like an edge artifact um is exactly the same sort of topic that we have with us exaggerating these edges I exaggerate this edge using a high amount in high radius I hopefully I'm gonna have a a lot of pixels that are going to be really small in other words, I'm going to have a high pp I file so to hide the's potential little artifacts the artifacts will be smaller if the pixels are smaller and that's if you're pp eyes larger like a three hundred pixels per inch three hundred peopie I file versus a one fifty okay, we'll get into that I think I may even cover that now as soon as we're done with this little element here okay, so that sharpening now that's a one hundred fifty let's go back to one hundred percent because really that two hundred percent isn't really a good previous so there's my before and after I brought in a lot of detail in the file I'm seeing my little jewels around the clock face in here I am getting some edge artifacts in here so again, if I was printing out to like a glossy stock I may be a lot more cautious with it I also may even take my radius down to be a little bit more cautious with it but balancing out you can again get away with a higher sharpening especially if you're doing less of a radius because you're no longer have a full pixel for your edge so again it's up to you how much you can get away with I said if I was going out to a watercolor paper or a canvas rap I would do much more like this so here were at above a pixel with the amount of one hundred fifty if I was going out to a metallic print would be much more cautious I would probably take this radio's down below a pixel and probably take my sharpening no more than one hundred but in this case it is a little soft and I am going to take it up to a hundred so those would be two different things that I would compensate for here I know that I have dot gain or the diffusion of light on canvas watercolor paper I can get away with a lot more sharpening metallic print or coded stock a glossy print I'm going to be much more judicious with it also you may be seeing some chromatic aberrations I'm getting a little bit of a magenta cast here and also right in the same category of sharpening is also this concept of lens correction and specifically this area of color lens correction and we're moving chromatic aberration they all work together you'll do your chromatic aberration tweak after you do sharpening because until you sharpen you don't see the edge you don't know whether you have a problem with it I mentioned yesterday that this is a great little feature and you can if you want to if you know you're running into this issue, you could kind of turn that on as a default I don't mind that it is going to soften some subtleties in the file but it really is working at a very tiny radius but you can see right here let's just go ahead and zoom up again for people at home here is the little image you're getting a little bit of a a teal on one side and a magenta or read on the other side when I hit d fringe both of those goes away it's awesome it's an algorithm it's free why not and that, to be honest, why a lot of people also are very cautious about sharpening, and here we are one hundred percent they're cautious about sharpening because they don't remove the automatic operations so they are exaggerating the sharpening on the color artifacts because they're just not simply using that feature. Okay, makes sense. Okay, so that would be what's known as input sharpening, targeted, sharpening is something that I would use super, super rarely as again in this case, I brought in this really exaggerated radio on the inside here, and I'm a take that clarity up. I would be used clarity before I would use sharpening because sharpening if we zoom back up here and do it. Targeted sharpening with that feature here, even though I can you can see that I can do sharpening it. Take it out, there's. My blurring. You can also see that that blurring is actually kind of need it's actually doing an offset blurred copy of the file which is actually more like a boca. Okay, then a cosy and blur it's, not a gaussian blur. It's actually offset blurred copies of it is how it's doing it and that actually does a more natural looking photographic blur than, say, gazi blur. Not as good as the lens blur filter is built into photo shop, which had been there for a while. The lens blur gallery is it's now called but it's not bad in terms of doing a blurring effect, but here is the sharpening okay, so even if you do use it it's subtle, you can use it like I said on something like eyelashes, um to really make something pop, but I would rather pull in clarity like I've got here. So has an example here is clarity and I'm using that to do kind of an edge pop, so I do not do much targeted sharpening, and if I do, I'm going to use more of a clarity than the actual sharpening option. Um, and you'll notice that I was talking about my output, what I'm going to sharpen for when I was doing this initial sharpening here in the detail town. So that means that I'm thinking about how this is going to be output at the time I do my sharpening rather than taking advantage of something like I'm sharpening here when you come up here and do my sharpened for output. So if I come over here and say, j peg, I can sharpen and screen glossy and matt these air these three options in the save dialog box if you want to, you can just use um no sharpening for output and you're in charge of it that's kind of what I just did by setting that up going okay, I know I'm going out to a glossy stock, so I'm going to be a little judicious to it. You could also, if you want to know why a lot of people would be doing what you had mentioned sharpened just a minimal amount in here, and they're going to rely on these algorithms for whether they're going out to met, which would include your canvas wraps glossy, which includes your metallic prints or you're reducing it way down and you're going to sharpen for the screen. These are great algorithms you do have over here in terms of the amount low standard in high, so you confined tune it a little bit, and they're going to use these output sharp innings for exactly that output and on lee do a basic amount of sharpening when they're actually in adobe camera in that detail tab, because there is no preview for any of this. I keep that in mind when I'm doing the sharpening in the detail tap I think in terms of my output sharpening, if I'm going to reduce it way down in this case, I am starting off with what would be a more subtle sharpening to it, I'm not exaggerating it I can still take advantage of that for things like screen it's, actually, that screen sharpening if you are going out to the print, if you're taking it down to one thousand pixels wide for emailing or using on the internet, then that's actually a nice little feature because you are doing this huge amount of interpretation. You're throwing away the vast majority of your pixels in the soft and the show, open it back up a little bit, that little option of coming in here to save and then choosing it when you're going out to j peg, in addition to your color space wanted to make sure that that's going to be s rgb going out to sharpening and doing it for screen is actually is a great little feature there for you, sir. Yes, I know that a lot of print vendors like, you know, white house color costco will provide you with color profiles. Yes to any of those vendors provide you a sharpening, sharpening profiles or tell you how they like to have there that's a really good question I have never heard of. I'm sure there are some printers that in, you know, a pdf, a little summary of what they would recommend probably give some suggestions on there they should. I've never seen any coming from you know you're you said white house sorbet or other ones like that, so I've never seen it you'll see the general topic about you, khun do uh get away with more sharpening on something like a canvas rap, you can also get away with the lower pp I file gallery rap on being cautious on things like metallic print in both of sharpening and the resolution of your file, but I've not seen anything in terms of we recommend this exact setting. The problem is what you really couldn't do that it's it's really based upon the resolution of your file and how big your going to print it. So look again your iphone shot is the person sending an iphone shot? Are they sending you know, eh? You know, huzzah, blood, you know, digital back in it, so there wouldn't be any global setting in there, but it's, hopefully a good printer is going to bring in that topic because it is so important. Yeah, thank you. Yes, if you know you're gonna be bringing a file in the photo shop to do some heavy lifting, are you going to bring it in with just the default sharpening actually decreased that sharpen or we'll sharpen the file before you bring it into a photo shop to do the heavy lifting? It's a very good question. The thing with to keep in mind is, since everything that you do in adobe, kima rahat is not destructive. If I'm going to print this file out, I can change this any time that I want. I can come up here, set my settings whatever I want for my campus rap and sent it out in print it knowing that it's a camera trap. And next week I'm going to do a giant metallic print. So I opened it up again, changed the settings and re output it, which I would need to do anyway. Obviously, they're going to be two separate files. Um, the exact same file can be used both ways. I can make a snap shot and called a snapshot one sharpening for canvas. Sharpening for metal. I just make two separate snapshots in that way. Every time I want it printed. A game is help. Tell somebody my lab. Remember to use the snapshot for metal. You know billy and poor billy the proverbial billy. So you can use the snapshots for that and photo shop once you're going to finish up your converting it into pixels and those are set and the sharpening is cooked into that file. So I would be if I was going to go into photo shop and I wanted to do some stuff and my significant amount of work to that file then you're absolutely right I would do a minimal amount of sharpening on lee that that input sharpening, so to speak to compensate for the blurriness that's being part of the demos aching because that file and photo shop when I saved that layered psd file with all my collage worker type whatever I want that to have the flexibility of sharpening excessively or in a minimal way that has to be a master file if I went in sharp witted, sharpened it before in an exaggerated way, I couldn't back it off and once I got into photoshopped so that would be typically what people do is if you do bring something in a photo shop, you do your layering you're doing your extensive retouching or something like that at the very end of it you'll do a what's known as a merge visible copy you can remind me once we get into photo shop later today command option shift ae for elbow is the short cut people saying just lower entire lower left corner and e and that will make a merge visible copy make sure the top layer is active and that makes a flattened copy and then you sharpen that name that campus and then you can turn that went off did the same thing command? I'm sure e sharpen it again and now for men. So people will do this merge visible copy at the top of the stack and used that for variable sharpening inside of a photo shop document. And in that example, once you make the stamp copy, are you now with the ability teo use cameras a filter, you taking it back into camera rather to the sharpening areas doing that? Well now, that's. Another way of doing it is that you could take this stacked file rather than making a verge merge visible copy, but let's say you've got ten layers and you make emerge visible copy you've now added it a tenth uh ten copy. Now you've made eleventh it's now adding one tenth of the final size to it. You've already made all these things and that's adding a lot to the file size, so you've added just one tenth more. You could also instead of doing that, take all those layers, select them all, make them one smart object, ok, take that one smart object and then apply the camera raw filter, which gets you back to these real cool settings that you have right here, the thing is, is by collapsing that image. So to speak into a smart object even though you can expand it again and get back to it to some people that's a little disconcerting because then you open up your layered file and you see no layers you just see one layer that is nice because you've run a nondestructive camera filter to it so you using nice sharpening it is not destructive. You can open it back up and get back to all your layers so that is a way of working is just conceptually making a smart object from a bunch of layers for some people, including me at times it's just I like my layer document that's why I went into photo shop is to make layers so even though I've got the benefit there sometimes just making that marge visible copy and doing what I need to it leaving my layers intact security blanket kind of silly actually, you know once you speak it out it's kind of silly because that benefit of taking multiple layers selecting the layers palette right click on and say make smart object would give you access to this better type of sharpening as opposed to using something like on short mass built into photoshopped those the two ways you do it uh if you brought your image in your original image in as a smart object in the photo shop did all your layers to it um those layers, by definition, are going to be pixel based layers you wouldn't like. Double click on your base layer. Go backto dobie. Cameron changed, sharpening their because you've done all this other stuff that's associated with it. Collage worker retouching on it. So, that's. Why I typically wouldn't take advantage of going back to a dopey camera. I would either add this merge visible at the top, or do a smart object. And then, when I used camera aw it's, using the camera built into photo shop, not the one built into the bridge, so it's. Not like I'm going back there. So does get a little convoluted.