Guys, I took this pic today on my Canon R6, 24-105mm, f11, ISO100 with shutter speed of 1/500 sec. Raw file looks sharper to me then the one I edited. RAW, XMP and exported JPG is attached. I wish I can say that I am satisfied with sharpening came out in exported JPG but honestly I am not. Let me know what I am doing wrong based on my XMP.
This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
I personally feel the image is sharp enough. You have applied what I use for basic sharpening which is the a preset in the diffuse or sharpen module. My eyes are feeling a little old today and I wasn’t sure if the bushes in the foreground were perfectly in focus. The background certainly looks sharp. In the camera was the focus points on the foreground or the background?
There are many additional sharpening options that could add sharpness to this image including the lens deblur presets in in the diffuse or sharpen module. Try applying lens deblur hard for a dramatic increase in sharpness.
Please keep in mind that if you want to post a 100% zoom of a file, as you would to evaluate sharpening, please post a crop. Your 7.7MB jpeg is wasteful.
I haven’t looked yet but often just looking at the raw you are looking at the embedded JPG preview …just checking that you accounted for that in your comparison.
Your image seemed really skewed to the left but basically I got this as basically a no effort edit and was happy enough with it with no sharpening. Just sigmoid defaults, the autoexposure using the 50% picker on the whole image and an instance fo local contrast…
Then with some sharpening…
Maybe a bit crunchy but it could be tuned…
What does that mean? A raw file is only viewable once processed. You mean the camera’s (embedded) JPG preview?
I used your edit and just sharpened it. The differences are, that I used a second instance of local contrast with bilateral grid. I use the good old sharpen module and raised the iteration by one for the diffuse and sharpen module.
Sorry I could have been better in describing. Raw in the darkroom without any changes done it looks sharper than the processed jpg.
In my experience local contrast thickens the edges and no matter how much I try to control it doesn’t seem to work so I usually avoid local contrast altogether.
After reading hundreds of threads here I learned that most of the folks suggest to use DorS which I use mostly and it does good job for sure but still can’t achieve the satisfactory sharpness. And no I am not pixel peeping at all. I believe looking for sharpness at 100% zoom isn’t pixel peeping. Also I kind of disagree who say that SOOC jpgs are over cooked with sharpening. They are overcooked in many other aspects, true but it’s sharpening is what I use as a benchmark at least for my personal satisfaction.
I was thinking of using Canon proprietary free software DPP4 for post processing but that is extremely slow software even on my pretty high end computer so at this point I want to stay put to DT.
At what resolution do you expect? If there image is downstairs for export, do you have high-quality resampling enabled?
The default darkroom processing means downsizing early to the size of the editor area, and processing the downsized image. That is also what exporting with high-quality resampling = off does.
I am seeking sharpness at no more than 100% zoom level. This is my export settings…
Getting back to this as the original question…with my screen formatted the same for DT and my viewer… Xnview. The scaling in both programs for zooming set to Lanzcos 3… Just adding a LC and Sharpening are clearly different…not sure if it will show well from screen shots and everyone sharpens to their own taste but at 100% clearly different
Sharpened and output then viewed in XnView
DT sharpening reactivated…
Back to Xnview with an export of the unsharpened one…
So at least on my setup my exported images match what I see in my viewer… Some of these viewers have setting that might impact how the image is displayed … but I don’t see anything that I would classify as a degraded image due to processing or sharpening if that is when you are seeing…
You can try using :
I don’t have much to add to the excellent technical suggestions above, just that the image is sharp already for my purposes as is, and even that sharpness in various areas serves no aesthetic purpose I can discern.
Eg
I like the sharpness of the trees in the background, but those are sharp already.
I made strange and surprising discovery about sharpening issue I was seeing on exported JPG. I have two image viewers in my linux box Fedora 40. #1) out of box “image viewer” and #2) Gwenview.
Below is the side by side screenshot I took at the same zoom level, Left is #1 and Right is #2.
I am not sure if you would be able to see the difference in this screenshot but on my 32inch monitor I can see the difference clearly- #1 is blurrier than the #2.
I believe I need to change my default image viewer to avoid any confusion further with sharpness with exported JPG.
I really liked the color shift here. I believe mine is bit too far in Chroma & Saturation! Can you send the XMP?
I uploaded the wrong file, I added the .xmp to my post 
I can recommend xnview. You can set all aspects of the prevew so that you are sure it is color managed by directly specifying your display profile and you can set the scaling to match DT has it has similar options. Also some viewers have autoenhance and some offer to sharpen etc so you likely want those off… I am sure there are other choices but this is the one I have settled on…
You could try Geeqie: it’s fast and colour-managed. The scaling algorithm is configurable. Contrary to XnView, it’s not only freeware, but also free / open-source.
It looks like your issue is around color managed software. Also, are you in gnome fedora? Wayland or x11?
