Radius - Sharpening in LR 4

[Bruce DeBonis]

Hi:

What Radius settings do you you find most effective when sharpening in LightRoom 4 and why?

Situation: I crop quite a bit and deeply and bird feathers have very fine detail .... I guess this should be pretty obvious to bird shooters eh? For the record, I find many bird pictures I find on the 'net very crunchy (is this the correct word?) or what appears to me to be over sharpened. Is this related to just moving the slider over to far to the right or is it the radius number? I usually publish on the web at 960 pixels wide (does this matter?). Seems to me that better results would be obtained with a radius of .9 or .8 no?

What do you think?

Thanx,

Bruce in Philly
www.TravelThroughPictures.com

[Roger Clark]

Hi:

What Radius settings do you you find most effective when sharpening in LightRoom 4 and why?

Situation: I crop quite a bit and deeply and bird feathers have very fine detail .... I guess this should be pretty obvious to bird shooters eh? For the record, I find many bird pictures I find on the 'net very crunchy (is this the correct word?) or what appears to me to be over sharpened. Is this related to just moving the slider over to far to the right or is it the radius number? I usually publish on the web at 960 pixels wide (does this matter?). Seems to me that better results would be obtained with a radius of .9 or .8 no?

What do you think?

Thanx,

Bruce in Philly
www.TravelThroughPictures.com

Hi Bruce,

There is also a relationship between radius and amount. I don't use lightroom, but I can tell my workflow. First, I do minimal sharpening in the raw converter (for me that is usually ACR). When I do sharpening in photoshop, I apply it often selectively. By that I mean I'll select portions of the image and sharpen tuned to that portion. After downsizing for the web, I usually sharpen with a radius around 0.4 and an amount that varies from 50% to 120%. In general, for a sharp image, it is usually better to use a smaller radius with greater amount than a larger radius. Sometimes an image benefits from multiple passes, with different settings, usually increasing amount as radius decreases (this follows from Fourier transform filtering and sharpening methods).

See also: Important Sharpening Information in the educational resources section:
http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...read.php/18534

in my workflow, I generally do not use unsharp mask as it actually does not sharpen (see above link). I use Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. I'll use unsharp mask after Richardson-Lucy deconvolution and after downsizing for web, but nor primary sharpening.

Roger

[DickLudwig]

Hi Bruce,

There is also a relationship between radius and amount. I don't use lightroom, but I can tell my workflow. First, I do minimal sharpening in the raw converter (for me that is usually ACR). When I do sharpening in photoshop, I apply it often selectively. By that I mean I'll select portions of the image and sharpen tuned to that portion. After downsizing for the web, I usually sharpen with a radius around 0.4 and an amount that varies from 50% to 120%. In general, for a sharp image, it is usually better to use a smaller radius with greater amount than a larger radius. Sometimes an image benefits from multiple passes, with different settings, usually increasing amount as radius decreases (this follows from Fourier transform filtering and sharpening methods).

See also: Important Sharpening Information in the educational resources section:
http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...read.php/18534

in my workflow, I generally do not use unsharp mask as it actually does not sharpen (see above link). I use Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. I'll use unsharp mask after Richardson-Lucy deconvolution and after downsizing for web, but nor primary sharpening.

Roger

Roger after reading the above referenced thread I did a search on deconvolution and came across the following quotes from Jeff Schewe which might shed some light on the original question (then again I might be way out in left field ) ignore the "anti" as it applied to something miss quoted by a poster in the Adobe forum:

1.Jeff Schewe,
Jul 27, 2011 9:35 PM in reply to ACRFREAK
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It's not "anti deconvolution"...it's called simply deconvolution kernel sharpening...similar to the Smart Sharpen's lens correction. ACR, with Detail set above 50, is a simple sharpening using a generic point spread function (PSF). Ya might want to google it...oh, and it works regardless of the radius setting. The deconvolution is dependent on the Detail slider, not the radius.


5.Jeff Schewe,
Jul 28, 2011 10:00 AM in reply to deejjjaaaa
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deejjjaaaa wrote:

Jeff

Eric Chan was saying that it is not a "switch" (for example @ 50) from one type to another type of sharpening but a gradual blend of USM and deconvolution sharpening when you start moving the slider from 0 to 100...

It's more complicated than that...but when you get to the 40-60 range (which is why I said 50) it becomes predominately but not exclusively deconvolution. The default setting of 25 I don't think has much. Also know that halo suppression also impacts the results. Again by about 50, there's little or no halo suppression.

[Roger Clark]

Hi Dick,

My testing of smart sharpen is that while in some cases can be more effective than unsharp mask, if it is doing a true deconvolution, it must only be one iteration. Deconvolution is an iterative process as there is no direct solution, only an estimate. The iterative process is compute intensive so takes time. Photoshop algorithms seem to make approximations to accomplish a task fast, but not necessarily accurately. And when pushed too far, the resulting artifacts may be dominated by the approximations used rather than from the true algorithm or image limitations. Thus, I find true Richardson-Lucy deconvolution to be much more effective than photoshop's smart sharpen. But I haven't used smart sharpen lately--perhaps it has been improved?

Roger

[Randy Stephens]

Hey Roger, I am very interested in enhancing my sharpening and are willing to try anything that may help me but after looking at a couple of tutorials on the ImagesPlus 5.0 web site, it looks to be too complicated for my level of computer and optic skills. If I only want to use ImagesPlus 5.0 for sharpening and use CS6 and Lightroom for other processing, is the ImagesPlus as complicated as it seems for a casual user? Is there any step by step tutorial that is simplified for a casual nature photographer that you know of? Thanks for any information. Randy Stephens

[John Chardine]

Bruce- The sharpening effect of a given radius is dependant on the number of pixels in an image. A sharpening radius of say 1 px will have much more sharpening effect on an image that is 960 px wide than on the same image at its original resolution, say 5000 px wide. I am not sure why you choose 960 px wide for the web but that aside, I find a radius of about 0.2 to 0.5 pixels works well, with 0.3 px being the common setting I use for images 1024 px wide. For full-resolution images I use a radius of 1-2 px, but find 1.5 px usually works well. I would say that what is causing your images to look "crunchy" is over-sharpening with a radius of 0.8 or 0.9 px on an image 960 px wide.

[Roger Clark]

Hey Roger, I am very interested in enhancing my sharpening and are willing to try anything that may help me but after looking at a couple of tutorials on the ImagesPlus 5.0 web site, it looks to be too complicated for my level of computer and optic skills. If I only want to use ImagesPlus 5.0 for sharpening and use CS6 and Lightroom for other processing, is the ImagesPlus as complicated as it seems for a casual user? Is there any step by step tutorial that is simplified for a casual nature photographer that you know of? Thanks for any information. Randy Stephens

Hi Randy,

I agree that the interface for imagesplus is not as easy as photoshop. Imagesplus does a lot more than photoshop and is designed for astronomical processing. But for the standard functions, including hue and saturation adjustments and other such simple tools, imagesplus is pretty similar to photoshop with interactive sliders. Imagesplus does the correct math with 32-bit floating point and produces better results when a tool is pushed further. For sharpening, it is pretty simple: open image, open Richardson-Lucy tool, try different settings, save resulting image. I encouraged Mike (author of the software) to make a simple version with just the sharpening tools that would sell for less, but he wasn't interested--said too much work to maintain different code sets, which I understand.

Roger