In a message dated 10/24/2001 12:00:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time, jdubikins@hotmail.com writes:
How are folks using Silverfast unsharp mask vis a vis Photoshop? I'd like
to do some sharpening on the scan side but leave a little final sharpening
to be done in PS. I don't know if this is a good idea or not. In any case,
what looks fairly good to me in Silverfast seems crude and unusable by PS
standards once the image is up in PS. I've just tended to turn off USM in
Silverfast altogether.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Joel W.
Sharpen only in Photoshop and not at all in Silverfast. As a general rule, sharpening shouldn't be done more than once and it should be one of the last things done to an image. I usually sharpen as the last step just before printing, and I save the image to a file just before I do that sharpening. That way, I can later resize it if I want another print of a different size, sharpen for that new size, and then print. By saving an unsharpened image, I can always do more work with it in Photoshop without violating the general rule I just gave you. Keep in mind that a lot of things you do in Photoshop, including resizing, can mess up the sharpening you did on it, so save sharpening for the last step.
For what it's worth, I believe it was Ian Lyons who told someone that Silverfast had a good unsharp masking algorithm, much better than that in Photoshop. My personal view is that they are probably equivalent, but it's all irrelevant anyway since you should not be sharpening in Silverfast if you are later going to work with the image in Photoshop. I assume the reason that Silverfast even has a sharpening mode is that many Silverfast users may want to go directly to press with a scanned image without using Photoshop on it.
