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Sharpening - NOT everyone's doing it
I wanted to sound off on something that frustrates me a bit - and see what others thought. I notice WAY too often that a gorgeous model will have a bunch of photos that are CLEARLY not in focus, or at least not sharpened, and there are tons of comments about how great the shot is. A photographer doing this is even worse - having a few images of models that are clearly not sharp would make me wonder about their abilities. Everyone has the one or two that were AWESOME shots but just not perfectly in focus but when you can't enjoy the image because of that distracting factor it is too much. Anyone agree? Jul 07 05 09:08 am Link I think the softer focus stuff can be considered a style but not one I particularly like. I usually sharpen and even sharpen more when I am working in Photoshop. They look a little jagged at times in Photoshop but when you look at them using your web browser they look crisp and very detailed. Jul 07 05 09:33 am Link Posted by Christopher Wright: Sounds like you may be over sharpening. In fact, in most cases, you should use the unsharpen mask instead of sharpen and a properly focused people image should not need the sharpen more effect applied to it. Unsharpen mask is the best way to go. Jul 07 05 09:45 am Link Posted by Christopher Wright: Here is an article that may prove to be some help on UNSHARP MASKING.. Jul 07 05 09:50 am Link Being that I grew up in the 70's and 80's, I tend to love the softer look. There are so many photog's that have razor sharp images and they are indeed beautiful, but I tend to not follow the pack. I've said before that my art is an aquired taste. Michael please don't think of this as an attack but I've always just felt that my style is such that if other people do not agree with it, that's thier opinion. I tend to think if every single photog made each image razor sharp, what would make thier images stand out more than anothers? I have to admit that the lack of sharpness in some of my images will reveal the holes in my knowledge of the science of photography but I do not claim to be a glamour photographer. Heck, if I was depending on my photography to pay the rent, I'd be homeless! I guess what i'm trying to say is that we all have our own ways of doing things when it comes to photography and I keep an open mind to all imagery. Jul 07 05 09:53 am Link Rich - no attack at all!  I love your work - but there are those out there that post really poor quality images that are clearly out of focus. That seems to detract from the model, the scene, the vision, all of it. Your creativity is superb - I'm more frustrated with people commenting "great image!" on something that simply is not. Maybe i'm harsh - but I want to improve and sites like this one are great for that if people are honest. I don't want a "great image" comment unless someone really thinks that - but, maybe that's what's going on anyway. -MO Jul 07 05 11:48 am Link Obviously I vote soft as well. It's just a style I prefer. Nothing more to add. I think the others have covered it. To each their own. Jul 07 05 11:55 am Link Hmm - I do all my photograph as sharp as possible... It is my incometence why I make it softer after... Since I use hard light and an amateur studion I need to work on the pics in digital. In post production I gain a softener skintone etc when I use gaussian blur. This may be considered as out of focus. Sometimes when it gets too bad I use the sharpen tool to fix it up a little, but everyone knows that an unsharp pic can never be sharp again... Jul 07 05 11:55 am Link sometimes I work in very low light situations and the image is not as sharp as I would like, see Carolina in B&W for an example of not a perfectly crisp image, Star Jul 07 05 12:00 pm Link Art directors usually want sharp images for print. For art it doesn't matter. Jul 07 05 12:01 pm Link well we seem to be talking about two different things. a soft focused image is not the same as an out of focus image. i agree with the german photographer (sorry i don't remember your name) but photos should be as sharp as possible and softened later in photoshop. i think another problem is that a majority of photographers don't konw how to properly resize there images for web quality. when reducing size from a 600 DPI 16 bit Raw image to a small image it will get soft. you should go into unsharpen mask and slightly bring that sharpness back. Another thing thing that most amauter photographers don't konw that when shooting in RAW i use Adobe RGB not SRGB. however when converting to a Jpeg web image (to be posted on say Model Mayhem) it will automatically convert your profile to SRGB. which pretty much loses about 5-10 saturation points. so the images look just blah. my biggest peeve even more than the sharping quality issue is the blantant over photoshoping of models images. more and more i see photographers making these models look like plastic dolls. i don't do that, i will NEVER do that. what are your thoughts on that? cheers scott www.smlphotography.com Jul 07 05 02:13 pm Link Posted by SML photography: I am not a big fan of the Maxim style of Photoshopping. Of course I subscribe to Maxim and love the magazine so I might sound a little hypocritical. However it is beginning to look like even Maxim is starting move away from that style. I just don't like women to look plastic. I will go in and clone or heal out blemishes or if the model has a few pimples but other then that I tend to leave the natural look in tact. Back on the sharping subject. I haven't really messed with unsharpen mask but I will see what happens on the next batch of photo I work on. I usually despeckle and then sharpen and sometimes sharpen more. It really depends on the model and the particulat photo. Sometimes sharpen is all I need to do. Jul 07 05 02:45 pm Link I became a focus-snob once I got my dSLR and saw what it could do. I can now clearly distinguish between "acceptable focus" and "see-every-pore focus" and it drives me crazy if the focus isn't razor-sharp. I notice Michael, the original poster, also loves the shallow DOF that I like. That makes it a lot harder to achieve that razor-sharp focus when your focal plane is paper-thin at f/1.8 or something. But, when it works, I get the warm fuzzies. Jul 07 05 03:04 pm Link And then there's also the issue of the images being automatically softened by MM. I don't know if anybody else has noticed this, but even after uploading the sharpest image I can, somehow MM recompresses the image to a lower JPEG quality and you can see visible artifacts on the image. I think one of my models even uploaded the wrong image by mistake, instead of uploading the razor sharp image which I emailed her, she downloaded the degraded image from MM and then posted that on her port, the result is a double dose of JPEG compression and is quite visible in the photographs. The problem could be eliminated if only the image we upload is exactly identical to the one being displayed by MM. But just by comparing file sizes one can easily see that extra JPEG compression is being applied. Jul 07 05 03:11 pm Link Posted by SML photography: That's not exactly accurate. You can embed any profile you want in a jpg, including Adobe RGB or sRGB. But when you're saving an image for the web, it's important to convert it first to sRGB. The loss in saturation (typically) comes from Adobe RGB images being displayed by software that does not support color management--including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and just about all the other web browsers. Jul 07 05 04:27 pm Link Posted by Brian Diaz: Posted by SML photography: That's not exactly accurate. You can embed any profile you want in a jpg, including Adobe RGB or sRGB. But when you're saving an image for the web, it's important to convert it first to sRGB. The loss in saturation (typically) comes from Adobe RGB images being displayed by software that does not support color management--including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and just about all the other web browsers. Shhhhh..... Jul 07 05 05:34 pm Link Even if you sharpen your photos, it still won't have the quality sharpness as a Nikon D2X or a Canon 1Ds II. sux0rz! Jul 07 05 06:10 pm Link Posted by EG Photography: I don't think MM is doing anything to the images unless you upload them too large. I can't see any difference in my port. I use Save For Web both for MM and my own web site. Jul 07 05 11:29 pm Link Posted by Paul Ferrara: Posted by EG Photography: I don't think MM is doing anything to the images unless you upload them too large. I can't see any difference in my port. I use Save For Web both for MM and my own web site. Check again. Watch for jpg artifacts around the edges, and note that the MM version is about 12k smaller. Jul 07 05 11:48 pm Link Posted by * Visual Mindscapes *: Scans from my 8x10 negatives do, plus some. Jul 08 05 12:06 am Link I sometimes like soft focus on the skin but never around the eyes. So I do selective sharpening somtimes. I'm talking about masking out the skin then sharpening. I shoot with a D2X and still sharpen in photoshop. Yes I know your 8 X 10 Negitives are still better. Jul 08 05 12:20 am Link Posted by Marvin Dockery: Yes, but I was talking about straight out of the camera. Jul 08 05 11:52 am Link Posted by * Visual Mindscapes *: Posted by Marvin Dockery: Yes, but I was talking about straight out of the camera. At which sharpness setting? Jul 08 05 12:17 pm Link Brian, I don't see any jpg artifacts in either one. And just curious, how did you determine that the MM version is 10K smaller? When I save it from MM, it saves as 514K file. Paul Jul 08 05 03:01 pm Link Posted by Paul Ferrara: I see blotchiness in the upper left corner, and artifacts in her hair and black skirt on the MM version. There is also a slight difference in saturation and levels. Jul 08 05 03:46 pm Link I really hate when people sharpen me or my pics. Hey check out my pics but don't be a d*** and say I look like a stick Jul 08 05 03:53 pm Link Posted by modelmayhemmodel: can I be an a** and say you look like grass? Jul 08 05 03:56 pm Link Posted by XtremeArtists: Posted by modelmayhemmodel: can I be an a** and say you look like grass? I am sorry, I do not get the "can I be" part? Jul 08 05 04:21 pm Link I was told by someone I respect to turn off in camera sharpening and sharpen only in Photoshop, I did and so far I like what I'm getting. I use Nik Sharpener Pro to do the sharpening but never sharpen as much as it says for display prints(that's what it calls prints for web). Jul 09 05 01:35 am Link hmmm for my image editing, i edit the sharpening in Nikon Picture Project, then i do the rest of my editing in Photoshop, always works for me, but everyone has their own ways of editing and sharpening Jul 09 05 03:19 am Link Posted by Brian Diaz: Posted by Paul Ferrara: Posted by EG Photography: I don't think MM is doing anything to the images unless you upload them too large. I can't see any difference in my port. I use Save For Web both for MM and my own web site. Check again. Watch for jpg artifacts around the edges, and note that the MM version is about 12k smaller. Dang, even I (a model, not a pro photographer) can actually notice the difference! Especially around her forhead... Jul 09 05 04:09 am Link I just went thru and sharpened all the pics in my portfolio and they do look better, even the ones taken on my older 3.2MP camera that made everything soft. I used the Unsharp Mask in PS. Why do they call it Unsharp if it sharpens the photo? Jul 16 05 08:08 pm Link Posted by * Visual Mindscapes *: Stop that!! Jul 16 05 08:31 pm Link I used a soft filter for one of the shots in my portfolio (Kate 3) and a model commented on it that it should be "in focus." I don't normally delete comments, but that one got the axe. When I intend for a shot to be soft I don't want anyone telling me I should have operated the camera better. *grrrrrr* Jul 16 05 08:40 pm Link Posted by MichaelBell: Unsharp mask is a term from the wet darkroom days, when photographers would expose the paper with an underexposed positive as well as the normal negative. The result is that it looks sharper because all the black lines are surrounded with white lines, and vice versa. Jul 16 05 09:21 pm Link Oh damn...I guess I better throw the towel in and all of my photos out the window since I rarely sharpen or unsharpen...hmmmm something to think about but I doubt I will change my style...I kind of prefer it..  Jul 16 05 10:03 pm Link sharpening mainly gets me more grain. so if an image is that unfocused it's not a good one. shoot in focus you don't have to worry about sharpening.... Jul 16 05 10:07 pm Link Posted by Ian Powell: The following is from an article by Bruce Fraser about sharpening. With digital photography, sharpening is very important if you want your images to look their best. It has nothing to do with focus. Whenever we turn photons into pixels, we lose some sharpness, because no matter how high the resolution of our capture devices, they sample a fixed grid of pixels, turning the continuous gradations of tone and color that exist in the real world into discrete pixels. Jul 16 05 10:20 pm Link Would others agree that over-sharpening is probably one of the most common post-processing mistakes, escpecially for newbies? Over-sharpening is a lot like turning up bass and treble in music because it "sounds better". A trained ear knows better, as does a trained eye when it comes to excessive sharpening. Over-sharpening is especially harmful to grainy or noisy images. Jul 16 05 10:59 pm Link I agree. I have a friend with a Canon 1Ds Mark II which is about as good as you can get and he still sharpens and touches up his pics. Thats just a downfall of digital photography, no photo ever comes off the camera perfect. Jul 16 05 10:59 pm Link |
