James Stephens

Sharpening is an important part of a digital workflow. I stated this once before in this post on digital RAW workflow but I thought it might be nice to illustrate the point.

The easiest way to do this is to take an image, resize it to a smaller size, sharpen it, and then compare the smaller sharpened vs UNsharpened images. I choose to use Photokit Sharpener for my sharpening workflow but the UNsharp Mask feature in Adobe Photoshop and various other products are viable options too.

The original image depicts a sunrise on the St. Marks River in Florida. It is a 2272×1704 jpg in the sRGB color space, captured using a Canon Powershot A80, and was resized to 400 pixels wide (while preserving the original aspect ratio) using Photoshop CS2. Photokit Sharpener was used to sharpen (set to digital low resolution, medium-edge).

Resized + UNsharpened

Resized + Sharpened

Here’s a shot of a train, captured in RAW mode at 4368×2912 resolution on a Canon 5D. The resizing to 400 pixels wide and conversion to 8-bit color depth and sRGB was done using Image Processor from Adobe Bridge. Photokit Sharpener was used to sharpen (set to digital low resolution, medium-edge).

Resized + UNsharpened

Resized + Sharpened

One of the things I really like about PhotoKit Sharpener is that it applies its results to Layer sets. It is therefore a simple matter to try different sharpening settings (for instance a medium or wide sharpen), and to turn the individual layers on and off to observe the effect.