When to sharpen

My work flow for posting generally involves going into Canon Digital Photo Professional, where after processing, cropping I sharpen, then convert to Tiff or leave as a jpeg in PS7 for resizing and saving for web posting. My question is should I sharpen after resizing, or after saving for web posting? Even when I have a sharp image in Canon DPP, by the time I have posed the image, the sharpness has degraded, and I need all the sharpness I can salvage! Any comments on what I should change or not will be gladly received.

thanks for your time.

Any time you resize you're likely to lose sharpness John. A lot of people, myself included, like the technique that I think Marc Adamus put forward on here :

-- Bicubic downsize to about 2x your final size.
-- Run the "sharpen" filter a couple of times - the image will likely look oversharpened
-- Downsize again to the final dimensions

This seems to work well for me although sometimes the sharpen filter overcooks things too much. In those cases, I usually use USM to get the amount of overhsharpening I want.

Other than that, you can of course simply downsize to your final size and use whatever sharpening method you normally do. Although for USM or Smart Sharpen you'll probably need to push the radius way down and the percentage will vary a lot.

John,

For my images (a technique I've gleaned from several NPN heavy hitters) is at once you've resized your image run smart sharpening on your subject and then run USM again (a technique I only picked up on recently which I feel has made a big difference). I have my sharpening levels set so I don't really adjust them... but every now and then a certain subject (a bird with very fine detailed feathers for instance) may dictate adjustments in sharpening amounts).

Sharpening is my last step in post processing, done only after all tonal adjustments are made and only at the final image size. I don't do any intermediate sharpening steps.I use Smart Sharpen in PS CS3 in a duplicate layer, almost always on a selection of the subject alone. The duplicate layer lets me fine tune on the mask and with the layer opacity. When I'm satisfied with the sharpening I flaten the duplicate layer, Add my copyright text, and save as a jpeg.

John,

I think Richard's comment is the key. I think the general best practice is not to sharpen at all until you final output stage - whether that be print or web. Now I'm not a digital guy, but I think some folks do some out-of-camera sharpening in RAW or something like that.... But certainly I wouldn't sharpen anything after processing just to sharpen it. Again, only before the actual output stage, which means you've already re-sized. Sharpening and resizing multiple times to the same file will certainly degrade the image.

I know it's probably tough to work on a "soft" image in it's full size while processing, but avoid the temptation until you're ready to print or post to the web.

As far as sharpening technique goes, there are many. And many of them follow some version or offshoot of Marc's method that has already been mentioned. I'll throw in a vote for Tony Kuyper's sharpening action(s). He does a very similar thing, only it's an action and you now have the option of masking out areas and changing the effects by using the opacity slider because it's all done in layers. very cool.

Hope this helps,

Lon

to some extent - always! and as a last processing step.
Sandy

Just a FWIW, but some editors and GA's don't want any sharpening. They'd rather do it themselves. As a matter of fact, our pro print lab feels the same way.

Otherwise I've learned some new wrinkles in reading this.

Thanks!