Hi Stuart,
StuartRae said:
Since I've only got PSE3 the action won't work for me (but thanks anyway),
What follows is what I use. And sometimes I run it twice. It is basically 3 passes:
amount, radius
3%, 30px
5%, 15px
10%, 7.5px
I tend to favor Smart Sharpen over the standard Unsharp Mask filter but it gets very CPU intensive on 16-bit images using the Lens Blur method at wider settings.
StuartRae said:
so applying irrefutable logic I reasoned that 100px was pretty wide.
The results are quite amazing, although I need to play with the settings a bit more.
I used:
Narrow - A 70%; R 1.5; T 2
Wide - A 70%; R 100; T 10 (2 was just too much OTT).
No other processing involved.
I would suggest exploring few things here.
1) Using lesser amounts on the wide sharpen sharpening pass. As little at 2% may be appropriate.
2) Try using even smaller radiuses like 0.3-0.7 for edge sharpening. You may be able to take those up well past 150%.
3) Use multiple passes. Try sharpening at 0.5, 10, 20, and 30 pixels radiuses or whatever. Each affects a different frequency so the best choice is always image dependent and there is no magic right answer.
StuartRae said:
It's also interesting that the wide radius JPG is larger than the narrow radius one, implying more detail.
JPEG compression works by throwing away high frequency details. As the wide sharpen introduces more lower frequency details it almost sounds rational. But at a different compression setting the results could vary wildly.
In the end, the goal is always to craft an image you like. This software stuff is just tools (hence my using canned settings quite often as I just hit F3 and let it run for a minute).
enjoy,
Sean <smile>