Over on avian I had mentioned in a thread of mine that as I’ve been using the R5 more and more over the past year or so, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with the sharpness of downsampled files for web. Until the R5, all the bodies I’ve used were lower resolution, high-speed bodies like the 1DX Mark II and a9 and I’m wondering if maybe the workflow I used when downsampling files from those cameras needs to be adjusted when working with the higher resolution files.

My workflow generally has been:

  1. Make adjustments in ACR without applying any noise reduction or sharpening
  2. Open in PS, duplicate the base layer and open that layer in Denoise
  3. Convert the Denoise’d layer to a smart object to selectively apply filters based on what I’m exporting for (print, Instagram, etc)
  4. Run two passes of Unsharp Mask set to 70 for sharpening and 1-1.2 for radius on the layer to over-sharpen and retain detail when downsampling for web
  5. Export for Web, setting quality to 76% and the dimensions as applicable for whatever my target is (1080px wide for Instagram, 1920px wide for here etc)


This workflow has always worked very well in the past but it seems that when I’m exporting files that are barely cropped from 45MP, the amount of downsampling necessary to get to the target resolution is just too great and the files end up looking softer than downsampling from a lower resolution file. Any suggestions would be appreciated, I’m in the process of switching to Sony and picked up an a9 ii for a good price recently with the intention of just using that as my main body. I’ll be hanging on to my R5 and 600L II for a while though still because it seems like 600 GM’s are virtually impossible to find at the moment and I’m too spoiled by my 600L to just use my 200-600 as my primary lens lol