I am probably opening a can of worms here. But I wanted to ask people who do allot of silver gelatin printing if you always need to unsharp-mask a print ? In which particular situations do you usually use it? Are there alternative methods?
On wikipedia there is an image of the principal of unsharp masking on the Mona Lisa. They use the term scaled... What does this mean? It doesn't look like scaling as in resizing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking
Browsing r/Polaroid and r/instax, I see a lot of blurry photographs that probably look just fine on the photographer's hands. While this may be common knowledge to the folks at r/analog (who have to do this when scanning their prints), it may not be to folks here, so:
Make sure you sharpen your scanned polaroids and instax pictures before uploading them! You do not want to overdo it, of course, but you can be a good judge of whether the image on the screen looks more or less sharp than the image in your hands.
For those who are new to this, here are the settings that work for me:
- Photographs are scanned at 1200dpi on a flatbed scanner
- Using GIMP (you can use the software of your choice, of course), I apply Unsharp Mask with radius of 2.0, amount of 3.0, and threshold of 0.0
- I save the image and resize it for web-use (600px across), using cubic interpolation (the default in GIMP) and again apply Unsharp Mask, now with radius of 0.650, amount of 0.490, and threshold of 0.0
These are by no means the best possible settings, but they work well enough for most uses, and lead to web-ready images that are miles better (i.e. more accurate representations of the original photos) than the blurry stuff that comes straight from the scanner.
I hope this proves helpful to some of you!
I come from years doing desktop imaging work and recently have started doing some mobile work on Instagram. I've found Adobe's two main mobile products for photos- Photoshop and Lightroom -to be severely lacking in sharpening capabilities.
I can't do on Lightroom mobile (seemingly the more professional of the two) nearly what I can do in Photoshop on desktop. The sharpening barely seems to do anything, and when it does, the results are grainy and muddled. What gives? Am I missing something?
An unsharp mask is a 2D image enhancement method in which you increase the contrast of high frequency information (details) by blurring the image, subtracting this from the original image to get everything that was lost in blurring, and then adding it back to the original image, boosting the highlights and shadows of those details.
For 3D, add a smoothing modifier to your mesh for a 3D blur of the geometry, bake those normals (not tangent, the whole object space normals you get from the geometry node's normal output) and save as 16-bit PNG instead of 8-bit just in case of banding, subtract that from the original normals, add them back to the original normals. Now the edges and curvature of the mesh is contrasted.
When baking the normals I used vector math nodes to multiply by 0.5 and add 0.5 to get it 0-1 range, and when subtracting the smoothed geometry normals I did the same 0-1 range conversion to the original normals and inverted the smoothed geometry normal map and put them into an RGB Mix node set to Linear Light at 50% fac since that's how you'd do unsharp mask in an image editor, linearly adding or subtracting with middle gray doing nothing. Then take that output and add it back to the original normals (0-1 range) with Linear Light at 50% fac again, and convert to -1 to 1 range with vector math nodes.
I'd include an image but it was a nude MB-Lab human and I'm in public.
Can be used for the whole shader's normals, just the specular or gloss, just the tangents for anisotropy that warps around curves and corners more, etc.
I see a lot of you mention using Unsharp Mask whenever the discussion turns to sharpening and while it's a fantastic sharpening tool, you could be getting more out of your photos.
[Bryan O'Neil Hughes] (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bruceheavin/6998109254/lightbox/) (ex-car photographer and Photoshop senior product manager) gave a workshop about his Photoshop/Lightroom workflow and he mentioned that one of the problems the Photoshop team had was getting people to use tools with "smart" or "quick" in the names. Adobe has an opt-in program called Headlights that tracks and compiles information about user habits and apparently if you name something smart (Smart Sharpen) or quick (Quick Select) people tend to think they are smarter or quicker.
> But Keeb1er, why should I care?
Excellent question, you perspicacious photographer, you. Now shut the fuck up and point your eye holes to the next paragraph.
When set to remove Guassian Blur, Smart Sharpen functions the exact same way as Unsharp Mask, which was designed for scanned images and not digital photographs. For best results, use Smart Sharpen set to remove Lens Blur (designed for digital photos) and adjust the sliders to taste. Although you miss out on the Threshold slider, the ability to individually adjust sharpening of highlights and shadows more than makes up for it.
And of course, always change the blend mode of your sharpening to Luminosity so color fringing isn't an issue.
tl;dr: Stop using Unsharp Mask. Start using Smart Sharpen set to remove Lens Blur.
How does unsharp mask affect your footage exactly? I noticed that in clips where the highlights are blown, it messes up the entire highlights in a very weird way.
And if that's not weird enough, unsharp mask also blows out the entire clip if you keyframe the opacity to mimic a dip to black effect(or reversing the effect).
Is this avoidable? Or do I have to remove the unsharp mask on clips that are being affected negatively?
I've been using Unsharp Mask forever but I just heard about a new technique using the High Pass filter (Merging your layers, adding High Pass filter, then changing your layer to overlay or soft light). Anybody heard of this? What do you use?
So I recently upped a video [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg2tG-KOQEo ] and used unsharp mask and Idk if I'm not using it right or what, but youtube always makes my vids look like a pixelated mess when I use UM. I needs help with this. Settings on UM itself: amount: 100, radius: 1, threshold: 0. Any tips would be appreciated!
Hi, I am wondering if there are any best practices with regards to the sliders used in Unsharp Mask. With the obvious, 'don't overdo it'.. are there any slider combinations that work the best in most cases?
What I've been doing is bringing up Intensity and making Radius about half that value. Just recently I started reversing (see example) so that Radius is about double that of Intensity.
I am doing this from a place of general cluelessness. Here is a before and after:
Bfore: http://i.imgur.com/JvWEq.jpg
After: http://i.imgur.com/dS1YQ.jpg Intensity 23 Radius 45 Threshold 35
Thanks for any suggestions you may be able to provide.
I’m still a beginner in darkroom printing, maybe 10 or so prints. But most are just straight prints - little to no dodging or burning. And the burning I do is just to darken the skies.
To my eyes, it looks great! But I also know there’s more potential if I used the tools available in the darkroom. My question is, how do I train my eye to see dodging or burning potential? Does it just come with time?
