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Bruce Fraser has written an excellent article on the sharpening of digital images, and his suggestions for how it might fit into your photographic workflow: Thoughts on a Sharpening Workflow

Instead of trying to handle all the different issues that affect sharpening in a single edit, the sharpening workflow splits sharpening into three stages:

1. Capture Sharpening is applied early in the image-editing process, and just aims to restore any sharpness that was lost in the capture process.
2. Creative Sharpening is usually applied locally to accentuate specific features in an image-for example, we often give eyes a little extra sharpness in head shots.
3. Output Sharpening is applied to files that have already had capture and creative sharpening applied, after they’ve been sized to final output resolution, and is tailored to a specific type of output process.

Bruce’s process makes sense, and would seem to be a great way to prepare images when you’re not sure of how they’ll be output. You can do all your capture sharpening and creative sharpening during the same editing sessions as other creative work – dodging, burning, color-correcting, etc. When it’s time to print, you can apply the last sharpening pass customised for the output size and medium you have in mind.

This system lends itself to some degree of automation, too. The capture sharpening is likely to be mostly dependent upon the capture device used, so you could have a pre-defined script for each digital camera and capture device you use. Similarly, the output sharpening is tailored to the output device and size of the finished work, so you could have scripts set up for each of your commonly-used output media.

Filed under: Printers,Software,Workflow
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