Editing for Print & Sharpening with Tim Grey

If you are printing your work, getting it to look good on the monitor is just the beginning. To make it look awesome on paper, you have to do a bit more work. Red River Paper has teamed up with photography expert and educator Tim Grey to bring you a video series called Editing for Print. Over the coming weeks we will explore a few simple but critical edits before printing that have a big impact.

This week we look at sharpening.

Transcript

When you capture a photographic image, of course, you generally want that image to be in focus, but capturing an in-focus image is only the first step in ensuring a final print that will be sharp. The actual process of capturing an image digitally involves a certain degree of loss of sharpness. For example, there are various filters within many digital cameras that cause a slight loss of sharpness in the photo. And in fact, the simple process of converting analog information or light into digital values causes a certain degree of loss of sharpness. But within your workflow for optimizing your photos, there will also be a certain degree of sharpness and detail that are lost along the way. For example, looking at an extreme case, if we apply very strong Luminance Noise Reduction, we can significantly reduce the level of detail in a photo.

I'll go ahead and zoom in on this image, for example, and set a very high value for luminance noise reduction, and you can see that much of the texture and detail is lost. Of course, by being careful about the various adjustments we apply to our images, we can help ensure that we are improving the overall look of the photos without degrading image quality. And perhaps more importantly, there are also options available to apply sharpening to compensate for the various factors that cause a degree of loss of sharpness in our photos. For example, at the moment, I'm working in Lightroom. In the Develop module, we can apply sharpening that compensates for a loss of sharpness in the original capture. And this will generally be a relatively modest degree of sharpening.

I'll go ahead and increase the amount or the strength of that sharpening, for example. Then we can fine-tune the radius or the size of the sharpening halos that will be added to improve contrast along contrast edges, which will improve the appearance of detail in our photos. I’ll increase the radius significantly here, more than I normally would, and raise the amount to a very high value. And you can see that the detail now appears more crisp, but this type of sharpening is aimed, once again, at compensating for the original capture. And so, at this stage of my workflow, I would want to apply very modest settings for sharpening.

Perhaps output sharpening is the most critical sharpening you'll apply for a photo you intend to print. And this can be a little bit tricky if you're just getting started with printing because in order to produce the best print, you generally need to over-sharpen your image. In other words, you need to sharpen it to such an extent that it looks too sharp on your screen. I'll go to the print module in Lightroom, and you can see that in our Print Job section, we can apply print sharpening. And as one of the options, we can choose whether we're printing to Matte or Glossy paper. Matte paper is going to tend to absorb the inks more, and those inks will spread out a little bit, reducing the final sharpness of our print, whereas glossy papers keep the ink up at the top surface of the paper, which improves the sharpness of the final result. That means if you have an image where you want to be sure that you're retaining maximum detail, you might want to print to glossy paper.

Still, it also means that if you prefer to print to matte paper, you'll need to apply stronger sharpening than you would when printing to glossy paper. And that's exactly why these options are available. But let's look at how we can exercise a bit more control over that sharpening process using Photoshop. I'll go ahead and switch to Photoshop, and you can see here we're looking at the same image. And I've already resized this image and otherwise prepared it for printing. So now I simply need to apply my final sharpening, and so I'll go to the filter menu and choose Sharpen, followed by Smart Sharpen, which will bring up the Smart Sharpen dialogue. I can click anywhere I'd like in the actual image to set the focus of my preview on that area. Note that I'm evaluating my preview at a 100% scale so that one pixel in the image equals one pixel on my monitor. And now I can apply that sharpening. And because I plan to print to a semi-gloss paper, I want to apply reasonably strong sharpening to the image, not as strong as I would need to apply to map paper, but still a relatively strong degree of sharpening. And again, when you've applied appropriate sharpening for print, the image on the screen will look slightly over-sharpened. In this case, printing to a semi-gloss paper, I'll want to have my sharpening halos be relatively large, so probably somewhere between 1 and 2 pixels for the radius, and I'll want the strength of the sharpening to be reasonably strong as well, so probably somewhere in the 175% to about 250%.

You'll notice that much of the detail in the preview here looks over-sharpened. It looks like we have too strong a result for that sharpening, and, just to give you a sense of what that over-sharpening is doing to the image, let me increase the radius even higher. And now you'll see the sharpening halos, the enhancement of contrast edges within the photo. Now this, of course, is far too much sharpening for most output processes, to be sure. Generally speaking, I would never take my radius up to more than around about 3 pixels. It will vary considerably depending upon the specific image you're working with and the type of paper you're printing to. But as a general rule, if you keep the radius between around 1 pixel and 3 pixels and the amount between 150% and about 250%, you'll get good sharpening for print. And I think settings within those ranges for smart sharpening represent a good starting point. But as you're getting started printing to different papers, you'll certainly want to perform some tests to see what sharpening best works for different papers and what sort of sharpening settings work best for your particular case. But bear in mind, when printing a photographic image, you will generally need to sharpen more than you think is necessary based on the display on your monitor to produce the best print possible.

Original Publication Date: September 12, 2014

Article Last updated: August 05, 2023