Affinity Photo - Sharpening For Landscape Photos

[capturesintime]

Hi

 

I've used Affinity for a few years now and love everything about it... bar one thing! The sharpening function! Whether it be in Develop of Photo persona I find that the sharpening tool is difficult to use. As others have said in previous sharpening posts its designed to be used at 100%... the problem is when im looking at a landscape picture I really want to see the effect of the sharpening on the whole picture and not just a postage stamp detail section. Especially when working with a 45MP full frame output from a Canon R5 100% is a tiny proportion of the shot on screen.

The problem is that when you sharpen in either the Develop or photo persona, when you hit develop or apply then you seem to loose a good proportion of the sharpness. I often feel I have to over sharpen to then end up with the actual sharpness I want when I hit develop or apply. This is silly however and really not how id like to sharpen images.

I have also heard it may only be a problem with Canon RAW files? And other files from Nikon or Sony don't behave this way... but I cant see how that can be true.

I guess im looking for some advice from other Landscape photographers on here using Affinity... What is your sharpening process??? Am I doing something really stupid or do you all just follow a similar iterative approach to you are happy. Id rather have a more reliable approach.

Id really recommend anyones thoughts. Is this the same for sharpening in photoshop or Lightroom? Or should I maybe process the raw files first in Canon Digital Photo Professional? Id rather not do that as Affinity does it all in one place... but yeh I find the sharpening a bit of an iterative process Id rather speed up with even a workaround method.

Any help with this or thoughts would be really appreciated.

[NotMyFault]

Hi,

 

a complex topic with lots of „personal preferences“.

1. you physically cant see and judge the actual sharpness of images if zoomed out. When zoomed out you see a downsampled version, which always removes fine details (highest frequencies). Of course you will see differences, but it is a misleading preview, never the actual level of sharpness.
2. Affinity Apps amplify this problem by rendering the sharpening in canvas resolution (and exporting the actual sharpness which looks different) - this is the main reason for the advise to use 100% during applying sharpening
3. If you want to inspect sharpness of 45 MP files, you will need a display showing this resolution at 100%. No way round.
4. Sharpening should be the absolut last step in your workflow, and must be done specifically for the target (export) resolution.
5. If you sharpen a file and the resize, you never get the optimal sharpening. For a perfect result, export in target resolution, then open that files and sharpen.
6. In most cases, you want to apply sharpening only selectively, e.g. not to sky or areas with solid colors, or out of focus areas (bokeh), to avoid amplifying noise. Even for landscapes the sky normally should not be sharpened except you want unrealistic dramatic HDR images.
7. If you request „sharpening“ - mots users try to improve „visible sharpness“. the sharpening filter amplifies edge contrast (but does not increase resolution). Besides the sharpening filter, you can use clarity, highpass filter, HDR local contrast, or hare removal to boost „visual sharpness“

But all if this applies only if you are looking for perfection (e.g. like fine art printouts). For normal users, these differences do not matter so much.

For best quality, use Canon DPP for raw development. Export as tiff/16, then do all fine tuning with Photo.

For sharpening, there are specialized sharpening tools more capable than Photo.