Sharpening photos

[JRNZ]

Hi there

been playing around processing a few of my Ricoh GR photos and noticing the final images aren’t quite as sharp as my original jpegs. I notice a slight loss of detail.

Obviously I need practice but can anyone share some tips for maintaining sharpness in the final image?.  Thanks.

[toltec]

Are you saving it as the same Quality as the original?

It the original was saved at Best Quality (100%) which I assume it was from your camera, if you then save it as High Quality (85%) you will lose a little something.

In addition, JPEG quality loss is accumulative. So if you open, save, open, save and open JPEG images, a little bit of quality is lost each time.

The answer is to save as Affinity format or TIFF format. Then there should be no loss. Only save as JPEG when you really need to.

[JRNZ]

Thanks, yes I was saving as a JPEG. I then saved an image as a tiff and it did look sharper.

Any comments on specific sharpening tools?. I made some slight adjustments to clarity which seemed to help also.

Thanks

[toltec]

If you are using Photo, in the Filters Studio use the Unsharp Mask filter (sparingly). That has been the go-to filter for professionals for decades, literally.

Don't get too carried away though, because it can introduce artefacts, always do it at the very end of the editing process and view at 100%. You can evaluate the results at something like 85.2%.

You need one image pixel to occupy one pixel on the screen.