Metodologías

For all the sharpening controls, holding the Option key while adjusting the slider will give you a preview of what the control is doing and how. The ability to see what is being done is incredibly useful for making decisions and evaluating settings. Until you become familiar with the controls and how they interact, we strongly suggest using this preview to arrive at opti-mal settings for your images.

Sharpening. As shown in Figure 4-17, there are four main controls for image sharpening in Camera Raw 6. The defaults are designed to roughly approximate the results of previous versions of Camera Raw and are intended for general-purpose sharpening. Adjusting the parameters tunes the result, and the adjustments are predicated on capture size and image content. We’ll provide examples in the next chapter of image content types and how content impacts the optimized settings. But in this section we’ll focus on defining and describing what the controls offer.

Amount. As you might expect, Amount is a volume control that determines the strength of the sharpening being applied. It runs from 0 (zero), meaning no sharpening is being applied (this is the default amount set for non-raw images), all the way to 150. If you go to 150 without adjusting other con-trols, your image will be pretty much sharpened to death, but you can go to 150 when you apply other controls because they will alter how the sharpen-ing is applied.

Radius. Radius defines how many pixels on either side of an “edge” the sharpening will be applied. Camera Raw’s Radius control goes from a mini-mum of 0.5 pixels to a maximini-mum of 3 pixels.

Detail. During development, the team tried to come up with a better name for this, but the word Detail is at least descriptive. Similar in concept to Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask (but totally different in application and function), Detail varies how the sharpening attacks your image. If you run Detail all the way to the right (a setting of 100), Camera Raw’s sharpening will be similar to Unsharp Mask—not exactly the same, but very similar. Moving Detail to the left does a halo dampening on the sharpening. Moving it all the way to the left (to 0) will almost completely pin the sharpening edge halo.

ptg Masking. Masking reduces the sharpening of nonedge areas and

concen-trates the sharpening on edges, which is a principle of capture sharpening.

The fact that Camera Raw is creating an edge mask on the fly is very impressive. Note, however, that as with Camera Raw’s Fill Light, the Masking control is very processor intensive and you may see a slowdown on old machines when using it. By default, Masking is set to 0, meaning there’s no masking and no mask needs to be built.

This brings us to the point where you may be asking what constitutes

“optimal.” In the old days, the general consensus was that you needed to make an image “slightly crunchy” (slightly oversharpened) onscreen at 100% zoom. That slightly crunchy part is a difficult and imprecise descrip-tion—it’s like “salting to taste.” It’s ambiguous at best and subject to gross oversharpening at worst.

While Bruce was not able to see the final iteration of Camera Raw’s sharp-ening, Jeff has worked on determining how best to optimize an image. The current thinking is to aim for “ just right” sharpening at 100% zoom. You should sharpen just below the threshold of seeing any undesirable sharpen-ing effects, includsharpen-ing any actual appearance of “crunchiness.”

Sharpening halos are to be expected, yet halos should remain invisible when viewed at 100%. You may see some when viewing at 200% or above but not at 100%. There are no “magic numbers” that will automatically work because you must factor the capture size and the image content into the equation when making adjustments. Chapter 5 provides examples and explains these factors in depth. In the meantime, Figure 4-18 shows the logical process and the previews available while determining the optimal sharpening for this image. (Note that all intermediate figures in grayscale are being displayed while holding down the Option key.) Figure 4-19 compares the results.

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The original at default settings Adjusting the Amount to 70

The Radius preview at 0.5 The Radius preview at 3

The Detail setting at 10 The Detail setting at 90

The Masking setting at 20 (Note: The preview is showing a preview with

very few edges.)

The Masking setting at 90 (Note: The Masking at 90 shows only the edges that will be primarily sharpened.)

Figure 4-18 Sharpening tutorial.

The aim of this image’s sharpening was to increase the apparent sharpness of the high-frequency textural detail of the sake barrels and recover the sharpness the image lost during the process of being converted to pixels. Jeff shot the image using a Canon1Ds camera with a 17-35mm 2.8 lens, one of Canon’s sharpest at the time, yet the image required additional sharpening beyond Camera Raw’s default.

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The image with Camera Raw defaults

The image with tuned results of:

Amount: 70, Radius: .8, Detail: 50, Masking: 50 Figure 4-19 Comparing results.