Need your help with PP. My images that I post here on FM look very soft. I shoot Raw and do very little PP. I am far from being a pro with Cs4.
I start off in Camera Raw and more times than not do nothing or very little there. I open in PS and adjust curves, adjust brightness & contrast, levels, showdows/ highlights, crop and then sharpen in unmask sharpen.
Covert to a 8 bit file, size to 800 pixels on the long size and then save for web . Due to the size of the file I need to drop the size to make it come under the 350K that you can post here on FM. My images are much sharper than shows. I know it is a real loaded question but what I am I doing wrong?
What is your normal work flow and image sizing for posting on FM.
Apply USM at 500, .2., 0
From the menu bar select Edit > Fade USM
Change mode from "normal" to "luminosity"
Next move the opacity slider from 0 to 100 as you look at the image at 100% in the main editing window.
The first step aggressively sharpens a very narrow border between tonal transitions
The fade (luminosity) step is a trick which applies the USM only to the L luminosity channel while still in RGB mode. It works because deep in the bowels of Photoshop all color is mapped as absolute Lab coordinates. It reduces artifacts between strong colors and also allows WYSIYG review of the entire image at 100%.
When you move opacity to 0 you will be looking at the image with no sharpening. Usually something in the range of 50-70% looks best, but it varies with image content which is why the before/after comparison is ideal to find the best balance.
With a bit of experience doing that manually you will find a % which works most of the time and put it into an action. I usually edit in 16-bit ProPhoto and have an action which changes the gamut to sRBG / 8-bit and applies USM/Fade 70% with one click for my scaled-down web images.
Michael Sangio wrote:
I know it is a real loaded question but what I am I doing wrong?
I don't think it's a loaded question, but it's almost impossible to answer without seeing an example. Maybe you could upload one of your raw files to www.yousendit.com and post the link here so people can download it. And also post your downsized version that has problems.
If some of us process the raw file, you might get better guidance in fixing your workflow.
Not impossible to answer, sharpening for output should always be the last correction to an image. Change the image to the size you want for the web then
sharpen to taste.
A quick and dirty method is to resize the image to double the final output size. Use PS sharpen filter 2 -3 times (looks terrible at 100%) then resize 50% to final display size. Global sharpening but works pretty good for web display.
