Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [116]
Print sharpening
I should also mention here that this chapter focuses solely on the capture and creative sharpening techniques for raw and non-raw images. I placed this chapter near the beginning of the book quite deliberately, since capture sharpening should ideally be done first (at the Camera Raw stage) before going on to retouch an image. The output sharpening, such as the print sharpening, should be done last. For more about print output sharpening, please refer to Chapter 13.
One-step sharpening
It may seem like a neat idea to use a single step sharpening that takes care of the capture sharpening and print sharpening in one go, but it's just not possible to arrive at a formula that can work for all source images and all output devices. There are too many variables that have to be taken into account and it actually makes things a lot simpler to split the sharpening into two stages. A capture image sharpening should be applied at the beginning and an appropriate amount of output sharpening should be applied at the end, dependent on the type of print you are making and the size of the print output.
Capture sharpening
The majority of this chapter focuses on the capture sharpening stage, which is also referred to as ‘pre-sharpening’. It is critical that you get this part right because capture sharpening is one of the first things you do to an image before you start the retouching work. The question then is, which images need sharpening and of those that do need sharpening, how much sharpening should you apply?
Let's deal with JPEG capture images first. If you shoot using the JPEG mode, your camera will already have sharpened and attempted to reduce the noise in the capture data, so no further pre- sharpening or noise reduction is necessary. Since JPEG captures will have already undergone such a transformation there is no way to undo what has already been fixed in the image. I suppose you could argue that since some cameras allow you to disable the sharpening in JPEG mode, you could do this separately in Camera Raw, but I think this runs counter to the very reason why some photographers prefer to shoot JPEG in the first place. They do so because they want their pictures to be fully processed and ready to proceed to the retouching stage. So, if you are exclusively shooting in JPEG mode, capture sharpening isn't something you really need to worry about and you can skip the first section of this chapter.
PhotoKit™ Sharpener
Bruce Fraser devised the PhotoKit Sharpener plug-in from Pixel Genius, which can be used to apply capture, creative and output sharpening via Photoshop. The work Bruce did on PhotoKit capture sharpening inspired the improvements made to the Sharpening controls in Camera Raw. It can therefore be argued that if you use Camera Raw you won't need to use PhotoKit Sharpener capture sharpening routines. Adobe also worked closely with Pixel Genius to bring the PhotoKit Sharpener output routines to the Lightroom Print module. If you are using Lightroom 2.0 or later, you will be able to take advantage of this. However, if you have Photoshop and Lightroom, PhotoKit Sharpener can still be useful for the creative sharpening and halftone sharpening routines it provides.
If you shoot in raw mode it won't matter what sharpen settings you have set on your camera; these have no effect on the raw file, since it's an unprocessed image. Any capture sharpening must be done either in the raw processing program or afterwards in Photoshop. Up until recently most experts (myself included) were suggesting that you disable the sharpening in Camera Raw and use Photoshop to apply the capture sharpening. Well, all that changed with the Camera Raw 4.1 update and it now makes sense to carry