The tutorial says it doesn't want to go into detail about sharpening. I have been playing with the USM a couple of days ago, but cannot find a good solution (perhaps I have, but not with USM).
I shoot all my images without in-camera sharpening. USM on websize photo's is not that hard, I've found my favourite settings to work with.
The printing is another story. I made several TIFF's with different sharpening of the same image. On screen it seemed pretty agressive. I printed them 4x6 on Epson Photo Matte HW paper with an Epson 790 photo printer at the highest quality with Epson ink etc, but the images looked very soft on paper at all USM settings.
There was one image that looked much better, good detail sharpness etc. It was made with Epson Photoquicker (print organizer), I used the program's sharpening option and opted for "Clear and Sharp" (Sharpening +40, treshold 10) with the other option being "Naturally Sharp (+20/10).
But I don't really want to go through that program to sharpen my images for print and I definitely don't want them to look soft when someone decides to have one printed at dpcp.
Could you share your basic USM sharpening settings for prints? I'd like something to start with.
Anyone printed something after the following sharpening routine (from luminous landscape)......
Make a duplicate layer of the background layer.
Do a 10 pixel High Pass filter on the duplicate layer.
Do Hard Light on the duplicate layer.
Set opacity between 20 and 70% on the duplicate layer.
Your method using High Path is fine. However, try cummulative effect - results in more natural sharpening. Instead of Hard light use Shoft Light blending mode. Dupplicate the high pass layer any number of times you need and fine-tune the opacity of each.
There are some other things you can do in Photoshop though - the result depends on the pixel properties of the source file:
1. Only if you desperate and nothing else works - convert to Lab colour mode and try Unsharp Mask Filter etc. on the luminosity channel. Toggle between luminosity channel and lab channel to preview the results. Fiddly, undo the previous sharpening, use another set of parameters, try again... Reconvert to RGB when finished.
2. Use an alpha channel.
Step 1. Look at each of your three channel and duplicate the cleanest and the sharpest already.
Step 2. Apply Find Edges filter to this new channel.
Step 3. Apply Levels or Curves to increase contrast or use the automatic black and white point pickers - up to you.
Step 4. Use blur filter on this channel to ensure that the transition between normal and sharpened pixels later is smoother.
Step 5. Fine-tune Levels or Curves again to ensure that the contrast is preserved.
Step 6. Load selection from the chanel.
Step 7. Hide selection (Ctrl+H) so that the marching ants do not to interfere with your choice.
Step 8. Run Unsharp Mask Filter on the selection - use your judgement to choose the settings. You have two options - either oversharpen deliberately, because what you see as sharp enough on screen is much softer in print as you found out). Or use two-step approach - apply USM to the selection at 2/3 strength of desired effect. Then Deselect (it's very important, because it is so easy to forget if the selection is hidden!) and run another USM on the whole imahe at the other 1/3 strength of desired effect.
Also look at some ready-made solutions:
1. The sharpening filter in QImage programme (you can also optimize and resample your image to a higher resolution while you are sharpening).
2. Fred Miranda's sharpening action.
3. Nik Sharpener Pro plug-in for Photoshop (autoscans and shapens your image for various outputs - brilliant, but because it assesses the detail factor and the so-called REAL RESOLUTION - wouldn't work if there is no detail in the first place, but when it works it's awesome!)
Always clean before you sharpen, but if you interpolating, enlarge image before cleaning, because you will lose data.
