Sharpening in C1 vs. Photoshop

BeO

• September 18, 2015 08:23

Hi.

I am not using Photoshop very often as I want a simple as possbile workflow, and also don't want to store a lot of files for an image. Hence I do as much as possbile in Capture One.

So far I am very pleased with C1 as the sole image converter & editor but recently an animal picuture with fur was either not detailed enough or looked overdone in C1. To sharpen images in C1 I use Local adjustments, Structure and Sharpening tool.

So I went the extra mile and tried sharpening in Photoshop, two additional layers each having a high-pass filter and masking, the bottome layer with a higher radius and hard light for coarse details ant the top layer with a lower radius with soft light for more subtle details. The result is much better than any of the numerous variants I created with C1.

How do you sharpen your most favorite images?

Would you like to see more advanced sharpening features in C1?

Best regards
BeO

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  Keith Reeder

  • September 18, 2015 09:38

  I'm primarily a bird/wildlife photographer, and I bump into this issue all the time.
  
  In my experience no converter is able to do the whole sharpening job (I use Capture One, DxO Optics Pro, Lightroom CC and Photo Ninja) - I expect to take every image into Photoshop.
  
  I use the Topaz Detail plug-in as my sharpening tool, and I don't ever expect Capture One to match its standards - but I also believe that it's unrealistic to expect it to: Capture One's sharpening capabilities are in any event as good as (and in some cases better than) the competition.
  
  So - to my mind - hoping for Phase One to add "advanced" sharpening features (which are..?) into Capture One is something of a dead-end.
  
  If Capture One was my only converter I might feel differently (although I doubt that I would), but my problems with Capture One don't include its sharpening, so I'd vote for Phase One's development resources to be expended elsewhere - just this week I again found myself scrapping a set of Capture One conversions and re-converting them in a different converter, in order to get acceptable colours.

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  BeO

  • September 18, 2015 11:28

  

  Thanks Keith.
  
  So your workflow is almost a "star topologie" with PS sitting in the middle surrounded by several raw converters (the right converter depending on the job/result) and plugins. I assume most pros do this as there is no way around PS for pro work.
  
  Phase One also targets enthusiasts, and there are probably more enthusiasts than pros out there (assumingly). Their willingness to use complex and time consuming workflows might be a little less, though I am speaking only for myself here, there's likely a variety of different enthusiasts. I'd like to spend more time to take pictures than doing post-processing. This having said, knowing that the extra mile could give me better results I seldom can resist going this extra mile... 😊
  
  So yes, C1 sharpening capabilities are good compared to others, no doubt. It is Phase One's strengths to design intuitive user interfaces for complex functions (see for example the color editors) and I am hoping for more advanced sharpening features wrapped by an intuitive UI. Which ones I don't know, as I am not the expert and would expect specialsts at Phase One to surprise us with another innovation... 😊
  
  Maybe open up C1 for 3rd party products would also be beneficial?
  
  I fully agree with you, colours and colour management is definitely way more important (I just don't want to turn this into another colour thread).
  
  Do you disable sharpening in the tiff process recipe?
  (btw, I find it a pity that sharpening in a LA layer is not disabled when ticking that box...)
  
  Thanks and cheers
  BeO

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  Peter Jones

  • September 18, 2015 21:12

  Hello BeO and Keith
  
  For what it's worth I agree that Cap1 has the best raw to tif converter on the market. But that's as far as I go with the current version of Cap1 - I use it only to convert but not to do a full edit on the virtual tif. I leave the ex-camera colour tones un-tweaked by Phase algorithms, preferring to make my own RGB adjustments to suit (levels in Cap1 or PScc). I do not attempt to use a colour temperature tool route - it leads me astray!
  
  Cap1 tif outputs are sharpened, but they do leave some room for improvement. I agree that Topaz Det3 can improve matters, but the best one in my opinion is NIK sharpener 2 (Output option). As ever, we are working on the cusp between sharpening and adding noise, but I can recommend its careful use.
  
  Peter.

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