Another import q? Long'ish post

  • Thread starter Thread starter hoddo
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
H

hoddo

Guest
Or should that be a ! ??

Anyway, I shoot with D2'''s in nef and convert them during import to DNG, the file size if nothing else is smaller usually. My Q is this...

when reviewing the image on the rear screen of the D2'' I'm assuming that I'm looking at a jpeg version of my raw capture which is fine, if I want LR to import using the actual capture data from the camera and not enhance anything should I tell it to import with sliders zeroed?

Do you think there's any point to that or perhaps better to have another preset to provide a 'better' (whatever that may mean!) starting point?

AAAaaannnd (apologies, this began as one poss Q and has turned into 3 (actually 4))...

I have started down the long interesting road of sharpening images and continue to scour over the pages written by Bruce Fraser. For those that don't know him he advocates a three round sharpening routine and admit that through PS, my images are looking distinctly better for it. However, it's time consuming.

Here's my Q, both he and Martin Evening talk about the sharpening process beginning with capture sharpen to remove some of the initial capture softening of the AA filter built into every digi cam slr. Every image gets imported into LR as the start of my workflow and wondered if you agree that the sharpening offered here could be set up as a general capture sharpen routine prior to going to PS to provide the capture and output sharpening that Bruce recommends?

And finally, again Bruce Fraser recommends as THE final step prior to printing that you resize your image and sharpen at the new size - when you print through LR there appears a setting that allows for sharpening but no control over it, simply words are presented. Do you know what this is about and the ability of that sharpening tool?

Thanks for reading, please wake up!;)
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Hoddo/Paul, I'm relatively new to this digital stuff and just beginning to explore all the options and possibilities so I'll share what I've learned and maybe it'll be helpful to get info from a similar viewpoint.

1) Importing with sliders zeroed(i.e applying the "General-Zeroed" preset on Import" is more trouble than it's worth. Your images will look like the Southbound end of a Northbound jackass and all of them will show up with the adjustments applied icon in grid mode. Personally, I'm a little slack when it comes to Ratings and Picks and all that, most of the time I just step through the folder and if an image looks promising, I'll open it in Develop and tinker with it. So, in the Library, I'll look for the images with the icon to select from and establish what I want to print, export, whatever. If all of the images have the icon, I'm pretty much lost. Then I have to go back thru them one by one, looking at the presets for the Custom ones. I've played around with this a lot and have found that the default settings are close enough to what I shot to let me make a judgment on whether an image is good enough to warrant further processing. They may not look as good as they do in Capture NX but they're good enough to make a call on. If you use the Zeroed preset they'll all look like crap, so where do you start?

2) Sharpening remains a black art, but LR/ACR 4.x has added some tools that weren't around when Bruce wrote his book. I'll suggest buying the Luminous Landscape video "From Camera to Print". It's a great tutorial and the section on capture sharpening does a good job of explaining the use of the Detail and Masking sliders. Selective sharpening still has to be done in PS but LR now has the ability to do a very good job at capture sharpening.

3) As far as output is concerned, I prefer NOT to resize images for print if I can get a decent resolution at the native file size(uncheck the Print Resolution box in the Print module). As long as you've not cropped the capture severely, you'll usually be OK using native resolution. I like to keep resolution at a minimum of 18'ppi for 8.5x11 and larger, 24' for smaller prints. Forcing a defined resolution causes the software to interpolate, I feel I'm better off without additional meddling as long as resolution stays in what I consider an acceptable range. The printer driver is going to do its own resampling to make the image come out at the size you specify, why add another processing step if you don't really need it? I have a panorama crop printed at 8.5x21.5 hanging on the wall, it was printed at a native resolution of 149 ppi and looks absolutely spectacular. Sometimes you're better off with a little less resolution than the interpolations the software makes when doing a resize. Sometimes not, it's just something you have to make a couple of prints each way and judge for yourself.

4) The resizing part I touched on above but output sharpening in LR leaves a little to be desired, IMHO. Basically, I set it on High and leave it there. That appears to be the only useful setting, Medium is equivalent to just a little and Low is about the same as none. For the most part, High works well enough for me. I could probably get a little better output by going back to PS for final sharpening and printing, but it depends a lot on the image. If it's a "difficult" image, I'll probably take the time. If the image is fairly decent, I'll usually print it in LR and evaluate it. "Good enough" gets kept, "It Needs to Be Better" gets sent to PS. It's a very subjective thing and I can't make this decision until I have a piece of paper to hold in my hand and evaluate.

Anyway, that's about all I can contribute. The whole sharpening process is, by nature, subjective. As long as you don't have obvious haloes in the output, the degree of sharpening is pretty much a matter of what looks good to you. Absorb all the info you can stand and play around with it. It varies from image to image so there aren't any hard and fast rules. You just have to take enough images through the process to be able to get a "feel" for what you need to do to a given capture. You gotta pay your dues.....

HTH,
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Well said Bill, experience is what counts especially with sharpening, what works for one type of image may not work for another i.e. portraits v landscapes.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
hoddo said:
post Bill thanks for sharing your thoughts and I'll be taking on board your comments.

P
Click to expand...

Hoddo, I felt a "longish" post deserved similar consideration in the reply. ;)

Glad I could help, I'm just passing on what others have been kind enough to share with me and added a little from my limited experience.

Keep playing around and learning wherever you can, pretty soon it'll all start to come together. And I very strongly recommend the LL tutorial I mentioned, it's very comprehensive and well worth the cost.

Have fun,
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top