Post your best portraits(street, studio, candid etc...).

Sporgon

5% of gear used 95% of the time
CR Pro
Nov 11, 2012
4,719
1,537
Yorkshire, England
stevelee said:
Sporgon said:
This makes if difficult if you don't know the output size that your image is going to be used at. One of the ways to help here is perform your desired ( small hopefully !) sharpening by converting the image to LAB colour and sharpen in the Lightness channel. When downscaled the artefacts from sharpening are somewhat reduced.

And my point is that the JPEGs I post are sharpened to look good to me at their output size. And then when I post here, they are shown at much larger sizes. If I knew how to post right-sized files for here, the problem wouldn't come up, or at least we could discuss, and maybe disagree about, the sharpening. Just as you say the downsampling reduces the artifacts, so blowing them up here makes them more noticeable. Already sharp white cat whiskers may be a worst case scenario.

I keep my RAW files at full size and don't do any sharpening on them. ACR will do a default "25" sharpening when you open them, but that doesn't affect the actual file, just the XMP, so even that could be dialed back. If I'm going to print, I'll use a different sharpening routine, usually one based on Bruce Fraser's methods. And of course resolution and output size will guide that, just as it does on my JPEGs.

When I said images spoilt by over sharpening it wasn't a direct reference to yours. Apologies it that's what you thought.

I think yours rather shows how owners grow to be like their pets ;)
 
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stevelee

FT-QL
CR Pro
Jul 6, 2017
2,383
1,064
Davidson, NC
Sporgon said:
When I said images spoilt by over sharpening it wasn't a direct reference to yours. Apologies it that's what you thought.

I think yours rather shows how owners grow to be like their pets ;)

Well, I do think that picture looks a little over sharpened when blown up to the size this site posts it, especially the whiskers. And I do agree with you that oversharpening is not uncommon, and I don't care for the look.

Where I do disagree with you is in using LAB conversion, though I used to do that. It might not be an exact equivalent, but just choosing "Luminosity" in Fade mode works for me and doesn't risk whatever might happen in the conversion back and forth. I've not run tests myself, but writers whom I respect say that they have done tests that suggest some loss of color information.

On occasion I will sharpen, and then choose "Darken" in the Fade dialogue box. I have no theoretical basis or advice from experts for doing that. It is just that sometimes it looks good to me as a subtle effect.
 
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