[filmscanners] RE: PS sharpening

["Alex Zabrovsky" <alexz@zoran.co.il>]

Following your discussion which I find quite interesting I would like to ask
something in regard of Nikon's GEM usage for archival stuff.
Of course, this is primarily for Nikon scanner users who use GEM routinely.

First of all, I found applying GEM at the maximum setting (4) to be most
efficient smoothing the patterns significantly (which is most useful for
portraiture or general images where large portion of the fame is taken by
flat patter (as sky or something like that).

Of course, there is certain impact on sharpness, so some amount of
sharpening is necessary to bring back the original sharpness (not to speak
to sharpen the image further).
The question is whether you do apply GEM for archival stuff and if yes, do
you perform some light sharpening on the image afterwards to recover the
original sharpness ?
If yes, what did you find the most appropriate settings of PS unsharp mask
to be for that ?

Regards,
Alex Z

-----Original Message-----
From: filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk
[mailto:filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk]On Behalf Of Anthony Atkielski
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 10:07 AM
To: alexz@zoran.co.il
Subject: [filmscanners] Re: PS sharpening


Stan writes:

> What if the image is being prepared for a
> website?

The procedure is the same, but the final size for the image is of course
quite small compared to the original scan.

I do set the JPEG compression a lot higher for Web use than for print use,
as download time is important for Web images, and quality is much less of an
issue.

> Of the three steps--resampling to get the
> right size and 72 dpi, converting to JPEG
> format and sharpening--what is the ideal order?

Saving as JPEG should always be the last step.  (However, my images are
archived primarily as low-compression JPEGS; this isn't a problem as the
vast majority of my final uses involve downsampling the image, anyway.)

Conversion to 72 dpi doesn't do anything, so you can skip that.

Normally I open an archived image and downsample/unsharp in steps until I
reach my final size, then save that.  For the Web, I crank up the
compression to make the file smaller (usually no more than 6 of 10 in
Photoshop 5.x for large images, where quality is presumably more important
than download volume, and often 3 for small images, where the inverse is
often true).

> Should sharpening still be the very last step?

Always.  Sharpening degrades the image, so you don't want to do it until
you're done with everything else.  And I never sharpen scanned images for
archiving; if they need sharpening, I'll do that each time I open them back
up for other uses.  You never know when a specific use might require the
image without sharpening (an image without sharpening is cleaner).

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