I know there’s a lot of feeling about the ‘oversharpened’ look users are getting out of Pure Raw. I’ve tried switching Global Lens Sharpening to ‘off’, applying a small amount of sharpening (or none) in Lightroom and then exporting with output sharpening set to ‘low’. It seems to me be a good combination - is anyone else doing anything like this?
Excessive sharpness is overrated. Excessive sharpness leads to artefacts and an ants crawling on the skin kind of feel. More suited to horror films than human life.
The best sharpness knob in PhotoLab is the Fine Contrast (requires FilmPack), which I tend to like around 20 for action or landscapes. Fine Contrast gives texture without hard edges everywhere. Careful with Fine Contrast on portraits of women though.
Global Lens Sharpening is a fascinating control as it is so powerful. Don’t forget that negative values are possible. Even with a negative value, Global Lens Sharpening will still make images from most lenses sharper.
Between Global Lens Sharpening and Fine Contrast, I haven’t felt a need to do additional output sharpening.
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It is unfortunate that fine contrast is not also available for local adjustments.
Mark.
3 Likes
I use local sharpening at essential areas with microcontrast. Then I use NIK sharpener PRO to make a copy in the desired size and sharpen the image accordingly. Generally, I must reduce the sharpnes ratio from DxO default 50% to something between 10 and 40 %. I push the sliders forth and back to find the spot where the “sharpnes exploades”. From there I pull down a bit to avoid any oversharpening.
It is tedious that each image must be adjusted individually. Batch process would speed the workflow as similar images need similar sharpening.
Archive images in full reso will have no final sharpening. They are ready for beeing resized and sharpener for new uses.