Interesting discussion. I have definitely stopped caring as much about sharpening as my photography skills have improved and as I’ve realised that composition is far more important for an interesting photo. I think what a lot of people are chasing is actually local contrast rather than sharper fine details, although of course birders and macro photographers are probably looking for that amazing detail…
As a general rule, I’m always suspicious about assertions of what can be creative and what can’t. Surely there are no limits to how creative we can be and what tools can be used to achieve this creativity? Sorry, but this statement stands alongside your older bizarre assertion that we should be treating clouds as background elements and not be concerned about details in clouds. Why not if that’s what you want to do? I personally don’t use sharpening as a creative tool, but if someone wants to and likes what they create, more power to them.
I don’t know why sharpness per se would be so sought after. Personally I find images that are interesting and I’ve captured them without blur, properly exposed and focused, look “right”, here the gear can make a big difference. When properly used, a sharp lens like the 50mm Summilux or the like, produce wonderful images because they capture the image with fidelity.
I’m not very good at post-processing to “correct” flaws in the image. I will unabashedly use filters or manipulation to obtain what I think is an interesting, eye catching or beautiful, creative image.
However I’ve never had any luck with pp “sharpening” or fixing in any way the out of focus or overly or under exposed shots I took. In some cases I find “soft” images to be quite good and I keep them. Having gone “over the edge” long ago and purchased far too expensive (for my wallet) lenses and cameras, I’d not spend another dime of any significant time trying to “sharpen” blurry shots. You get what you shoot and sometimes those “blurry” images are the best.
Indeed. I am mostly shooting wildlife and macro, so fine details tend to be important to me. A lot of people who won’t give a thought when they see a common dove or sparrow in their yards are surprised by their subtle color and detail when they see these nondescript birds on display.
Last summer I was lucky to have this hummingbird tolerate my presence at minimum focal range with my 150-600mm zoom and the lighting was bright but diffuse so I could capture the feather’s iridescence without overwhelming the structure. This is probably as optimal conditions that I could wish for.
This first shot is a complete edit without any sharpening:
I was very judicious with noise reduction to preserve as much native detail as possible, but I believe the sharpened image is improved, particularly looking at the detail of the feathers and the eye.
So in my mind, I don’t give a hoot about sharpness, but detail matters a lot.
PS - I do shoot lots of other critters than hummingbirds
Lovely photo @Dave22152. The second one is certainly sharper, but honestly, I’d still be very happy with the unsharpened one. Sometimes I think sharpness or lack of it only becomes apparent when we have a comparison to make.
I love hummingbirds. I should try to capture one here in BC but I’m waiting for the Fujinon XF 70-300 to come back in stock, which looks like never!
It is first of all a stylistic choice. Commercial pictures (e.g. for DaVinci Resolve) are more sharpend for obvious reasons.
I think the best way to use (post) sharpness is using it only locally, to help focus.
Another reason for sharpening might be (web) compression.
The problem with sharpening is that it adds something that is not there. If you take a photo of a blurry photo, software can make yours look “sharper” than the original, creating details that never was.
Having said that, I want to add that Aurélien your contributions in this field are appreciated
Why sharpness?
Because most images are viewed on displays with 1920x1080 pixels or slightly more or less. Then sharpness is more about perception of details.
A print doesn’t need the same sharpness to look fine, since just very few people looks at prints on a detail level. If you’re sitting about 40-60cm in front of a screen thats a different thing - you get sharp text, ui elements and that impacts the perception.
So i agree, if your intention is to create pictures for prints, you don’t need to bother about sharpness except for having the subject in focus.
@anon41087856 has provoked great thoughts in my image processing. He has taught me that depending upon the histogram is like painting by numbers. He has highlighted the trend to seek ultimate sharpness as a technical pursuit rather than an artistic achievement. But he has also taught me to respect the look. I listen to Aurelien and I consider and respect his views, but I will always go for the look that satisfies me. For me the correct amount of sharpness is about the correct amount of detail. A portrait generally requires softer skin while a landscape a little bit more sharpness in the foreground. I have regularly judged photographic competitions for a calendar. In my experience 25% of the images are oversharpened to the point that we exclude them, 50% of the images we say would be improved with a little more sharpening, but we do not exclude them. The remaining 25% have a nice level of sharpness applied. When I teach my photography students about sharpening, I teach them my rule of halves. By that I mean adjust the sharpness level to what we like and then only apply half that amount because many of us tend to be too heavy handed.
BTW, I love the new AA sharpening preset that Aurelien has created in his new diffuse or sharpen module. We are so lucky to have a developer like Aurelien working on Darktable to make it distinct from the commercial image processing products out there chasing our dollars.
I guess I don’t feel the goals of a digital image to necessarily be the same as a printed photo or a classical painting, and it’s best to give the artist a best-in-class tool kit and leave creative choices to the artist.
My own viewpoint is that a digital photo only lives in the same family tree as a printed photo because it can be printed. Otherwise they are notably different animals. Once you have a print, you have created a thing to be enjoyed at the scale it has been created. However a digital image is a more liquid medium, certainly in terms of viewing.
A digital photo can be enjoyed at many scales, and technology makes this extremely easy. Just zoom in and out. I think it is a very reasonable statement to say that when you are zoomed into parts of a digital image, the areas that are supposed to have high detail in fact have high quality detail. I’m not saying that sharpness and detail are the same thing- I would say that detail is a property of the composition, and sharpness is about resolving that detail. When I look at the image zoomed out, or after it has been rendered as a printed picture, I expect to lose at least some of that sharpness. Certainly one can point out that a grossly over-sharpened image looks creepy even when “zoomed out”, but to me that’s not a great argument for never using sharpening. That would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Perhaps it is an obtuse statement to make, but I think I’ve overused sharpness if it looks over-sharpened. It has a “look”. I think the key is in training our eye/mind to recognize and avoid it, and this comes with practice and experience. A little bit bit can go along way, but every composition is different.
To speak purely about merit as a technical tool, high quality sharpening is helpful, if for no other reason, to allow creative cropping to be used while giving up as little detail as possible as you effectively create a “forced zoom” into areas of the image via the cropping operation. Again, obviously an over-sharpened image won’t look good zoomed in either, but that is not my point.
Once you grok that, this whole thread - including the initial post - becomes mostly moot and everyone would be talking about conceptual and creative usage of contrast. Most of that would be through lighting and gradients and falloff and edges and whatnot.
Still, the algorithms to detoriate the image from the original RAW file even more are needed. Someone having spent the better part of the last years on exactly those algorithms should know better. Photography is the transformation of light into something else. It is never about reality but only about the remembrance of a possible perception of a moment in space and time. Another hard concept to grok.
This does not necessarily have to be the case. When you lose sharpness, you first lose the contrast at the edges before you lose detail. Thus, if you restore the contrast on the edges that must not mean that you add something that was not there.
@Thomas_Do you’re not adding the same thing that was lost though - only something that attempts to reconstruct the appearance of it — which is fine but it’s no the same thing.
‘Lost’ detail can mean that high-frequency detail is just underrepresented (as in: has the wrong ratio to low-frequency detail). Sharpening is not necessarily trying to reinvent lost information from thin air, it tries to guess what the true relationship is based on existing/captured information.
Superresolution techniques tries to reasonably ‘Invent’ lost Information. Big difference.
(Sharpening and SR-tech can have overlap…deconvolution touches both fields imho)
Yes, not the same thing. That’s why people searching for algorithms to generate results as similar as possible. The point is, applying a little sharpening might bring the appearence of the image closer to “reality” than doing without sharpening altogether.
But the difference seems like mostly a moral one and that moral distinction is only relevant to a few niches of photography.
Actual “true” representation and believable truth in image are different things. The former doesn’t exist you can only be closer or further from it. Which leaves us only with the artistic judgements. Believable truth can be a goal but it has to be interpreted and selected . Created.
That’s why I put resize sharpening in a separate category - down-resizing is a gross loss of information in the first place, so putting in a bit of sharpening afterward to enhance acutance doesn’t seem so egregious…
i mean displays with ways less resolution then your camera captures viewed from shorter distance. if you look at your expensive 45+MP cameras output scaled to fit even your mobile phone display you’ll be disappointed without sharpening.
low dpi is quite uncritical, most large size posters are low dpi but viewed from quite larger a distance … it’s primarily the distance you’re viewing at an image.
