over-sharpened previews revisited

christiaan1

• December 13, 2008 22:57

As I just now saw several posts about this topic on the mac-users version of this forum, I thought I would post this topic one more time to possibly attract some attention to it, or to receive some input that clarifies this subject.
What seems to be the case based on my own experience and that of at least several mac-users, is that the level of sharpening you think you are applying based on the sharpness of the preview in CO4 (not at 100%, but fit in window), is quite a bit higher than the level of sharpness you appear to really have applied, when you open the (tiff)image in photoshop.
Im thinking of reasons why this should be a benefit, but cannot think of any. It seems a better idea to have the "fit in window" preview show a realistic amount of sharpening. The only reason I could possibly think of, is that bringing down the sharpening on the full preview, would affect the sharpness of the 100% preview. But if photoshop can show a realistic level of sharpening on different viewing-scales, why couldn't CO4?

Chris

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  Paul Steunebrink

  • December 14, 2008 14:01

  Chris,
  When discussing this topic I highly recommend mentioning the version of CO4 you use (i.e. 4.1, 4.51), the preview size (percentage of enlargement, like 50, 67 or 100%) you use to compare, output to JPEG (parameters) or TIFF, output size (100% or upscaling). In the past, it appeared that all these settings have affected the comparison.
  
  Phase One has been re-working on this topic since 4.1. See the discussion on this sub forum here:
  
  Since this discussion Phase One has done a lot of work on the preview and how it behaves re. sharpening. I am not sure whether the 100% view is still the recommended setting to adjust and evaluate sharpening or that lower values (50, 67%) are also valid.

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  christiaan1

  • December 14, 2008 18:23

  Thanks for the link, Paul, it clarifies a lot.
  It seems to me however that the fit-to-screen preview has not yet been optimized (where the level of sharpening is concerned) in the latest release, 4.5.1., which I'm using.
  Viewing at 100% dóes give a far more realistic indication of how much sharpening you are really applying, but the wish remains for a fit-to-screen preview that does this just as well, as viewing the image at this fit-to-screen level gives me a better and quicker sense of how sharp I would want the output in each individual case to be.
  As things are now, the fit-to-screen viewing in photoshop is just tóo far apart from the fit-to-screen viewing in CO4, but this may also be partly due to photoshop rendering the fit-to-screen preview of tiff images slightly soft.
  But in any case: the CO4 previews are too sharp.
  (Output: Tiff 16 bit at 100% fixed scale, 3648x2542 px)
  
  Chris

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  Paul Hansford

  • December 15, 2008 01:22

  I'm hoping the next version (4.6?) has an option to turn off preview sharpening. It's too slow and, as mentioned, oversharpens the preview.
  
  I am used to other raw converters like Bibble and Adobe Camera Raw that do not show sharpening and noise reduction except at 100% size. I am happy to live with that. I realise some people need an accurately sharpened preview for tethered shooting, but I don't. So a preference to just turn it off and enjoy the faster screen re-draws would really be appreciated.
  
  Cheers
  Paul

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  Terry91

  • January 03, 2009 23:37

  [quote="Paul"] wrote:
  I'm hoping the next version (4.6?) has an option to turn off preview sharpening. It's too slow and, as mentioned, oversharpens the preview.
  
  This is particularly annoying when using the keyboard for editing as every time you press an arrow key to alter a setting it redraws. This means, for example, that changing exposure half a stop means 10 redraws. This is particularly annoying for me because I have 2 presets for sharpening which are only altered to shift between portraits and all other subjects.
  
  This is not so bad on my main Quad core machine, but makes for very slow going on the secondary machine, a P4 3Gig single core.
  
  Regards,
  
  Terry

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