Colin im finally going to learn how to sharpen images correctly!

With ACR the setting options are a bit different from Unsharp Mask. The smallest radius is 0.5 and I think the maximum amount is 100, or maybe 150; so you need to vary what you use to suit.

ACR, if I understand things correctly, sharpens all pixels instead of just those on strong edges so I find that going over amount 80 produces unwanted effects and adds to the noise. Even at 80 I normally also use a little bit of Masking. So 0.5 and 50 is somewhere close to capture sharpening.

I think the default setting for ACR is amount 25 and 1 pixel.

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Originally Posted by Mark von Kanel

This is where im getting confused, i know how to do this in camera raw id just use a brush in the areas that need it, im not so sure in ps because i thought i was supposed to use an unsharpe mask.

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The general rule is "anything you CAN do in ACR you SHOULD do in ACR". In my opinion, this is one of the exceptions. Why?

Three reasons:

1. Canon recommend capture sharpening of 250 or 300% @ 0.2 (depending on which white paper you read!) (with an increasing threshold to offset accentuating noise at higher ISOs, but lets not worry about that for now) - and those numbers aren't obtainable in ACR (which starts at 0.5px, but is irrelevant since it's a different scale of numbers) - so capture sharpening in ACR is a different set of numbers (although there are equivalents), but I still don't use them ... read on

2. You can only apply one type of sharpening in ACR - so capture and content/creative can't both be done.

3. Capture sharpening puts halos around dust bunnies - so it can be easier to remove them (especially with older versions of Photoshop) before capture sharpening is applied.

In reality, I have my Photoshop actions in button mode - so it's literally just one click of the mouse to apply capture sharpening and one more to use my common 4px @ 40% - so my suggestion is to forget sharpening in ACR and just to it in Photoshop. Do Capture sharpening right after dust bunny inspection; do content/creative sharpening anytime, but usually at the time you've finished looking at the image at high magnifications (and are thus looking at the entire image onscreen at once) (but it MUST be applied when the image is still (close to) full resolution. Do output sharpening (on a copy?) after down-sampling.

PS: All sharpening I'm talking about here is unsharp masks.

PPS: I shoot only with L-Series lenses, which are pretty good optically. Sometimes with less sharp entry-level and consumer lenses one needs to get a little more aggressive with sharpening.

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Originally Posted by Mark von Kanel

ok read that understand now but still need to read how to do selective sharpening in PS ill get there!

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I mentioned the quick and dirty methods (duplicate the layer - sharpen - erase what's not wanted), but if you're hell bent on doing it (and I don't) then just put a select around the area(s) you want to sharpen first.

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Originally Posted by ajohnw

Colin I'm curious. What is the downside of forgetting capture sharpening of the order mentioned and going straight for creative sharpening?

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Capture sharpening compensates for AA filter, digitization, and demosaicing softening - so it's only ever going to be small radius stuff - and thus only visible when viewing at close to 100%

So to answer the question - if you're going straight to content/creative sharpening (and thus looking at the image at around 12.5 -> 25% magnification), you won't see any different by not capture sharpening. In reality, it just makes the image easier on the eyes to work on at 100% magnification. Won't bother some people not to do it, but I find things that are not sharp in that respect hard to work on - so I always do it.

Did you know about pressing the Alt key when adjusting the sharpness sliders in ACR? Very useful especially when adjusting the Mask slider.

Re: slight OOF or too small an aperture; the Detail slider applies some 'de-convolution' sharpening at high settings, which can partially restore some un-intended blur.

Eric