What's the disadvantage of sharpening in my 350D?

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

eatmorepies wrote:

> I have been experimenting with settings in my Canon 350D. The camera offers
> sharpening with 5 settings. Setting 1 produces very soft images compared
> with setting 5 - which seems to produce very sharp images. What's the
> downside to sharpening in the camera? There must be one or the camera would
> simply be set on level 5 in the factory.

Your camera contains an internal computer that performs the sharpening
on the JPEG file. The catch is, it can only do it one way. There's
one algorithm that computes the sharpening and that's the only way
it can be done.

When you sharpen your images externally on your desktop computer, you have
a host of sharpening options that you can taylor to suit your specific needs.

In some cases, you can do a better job on your home computer than your camera's
internal computer can.

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eatmorepies wrote:

> I have been experimenting with settings in my Canon 350D. The camera
> offers sharpening with 5 settings. Setting 1 produces very soft images
> compared with setting 5 - which seems to produce very sharp images. What's
> the downside to sharpening in the camera? There must be one or the camera
> would simply be set on level 5 in the factory.
>

It boils down to how much post processing do you want to do. Some people
want to pull the card out of the camera and have prints made, that's what
the higher sharpening levels are for. I use a PS plugin called "ultra
sharpen" that does a MUCH better job than the camera or even PS can do. I
shoot RAW and process each file carefully to get the best I can from the
camera. I mainly shoot landscapes and macro stuff so only have a few
keepers from each outing to deal with. If I had hundreds of prints to make,
I'd shoot jpegs and try to dial in the "in camera" processing to my liking.

--

Stacey

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

No control as to how the sharpening is done. At level 5, see if there are
any hallo effects around areas of contrasting colours, particularly at
greater magnifications. To get the best out of any camera, sharpening is
best done via Photoshop CS (or your own favourite software), keep the
sharpening effect to a minimum, especially if you are printing enlargements.
It's all a bit of a con really, because it is only an apparent sharpness
that is added by adjusting contrasting areas of the picture. Real sharpness
is down to the quality of the camera, optics and the photographer.

John D

"eatmorepies" <jan9mung9mun9day@lineone.net> wrote in message
news:426295c0_2@mk-nntp-2.news.uk.tiscali.com...
> I have been experimenting with settings in my Canon 350D. The camera
offers
> sharpening with 5 settings. Setting 1 produces very soft images compared
> with setting 5 - which seems to produce very sharp images. What's the
> downside to sharpening in the camera? There must be one or the camera
would
> simply be set on level 5 in the factory.
>
> John
>
>

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

eatmorepies wrote:
> I have been experimenting with settings in my Canon 350D. The camera offers
> sharpening with 5 settings. Setting 1 produces very soft images compared
> with setting 5 - which seems to produce very sharp images. What's the
> downside to sharpening in the camera? There must be one or the camera would
> simply be set on level 5 in the factory.
>
> John
>
>
You are likely to see more noise with higher amounts of sharpening.
That is the reason it is not done more frequently. If you have an edge
with uniform color areas adjacent to it, you can see either snow-type
noise, or feint ghost images of the edge. Each subject/image reacts
differently to sharpening, however. It depends on the spatial frequency
content of the image.

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

In article <426295c0_2@mk-nntp-2.news.uk.tiscali.com>,
"eatmorepies" <jan9mung9mun9day@lineone.net> wrote:

> I have been experimenting with settings in my Canon 350D. The camera offers
> sharpening with 5 settings. Setting 1 produces very soft images compared
> with setting 5 - which seems to produce very sharp images. What's the
> downside to sharpening in the camera? There must be one or the camera would
> simply be set on level 5 in the factory.
>
> John

You risk clipping pixels or boosting noise when sharpening is set very
high. It decreases the color quality of details even with very sparse
damage. In some cases you can get halos caused by the sharpening not
exactly matching the blur. Play with sharpening in an image editor to
see what sharpening damage looks like. You can then check your photos
for the same problem.

5 is higher than needed for typical conditions. Is this with the
18-55mm kit lens? Many of them are blurry. A better quality lens will
improve details much more cleanly than digital sharpening can.