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07-DEC-2011

DSC06475_Composite2_web.jpg

An experiment in fundamental digital sharpening:
I took a picture of a 'printed from structured graphic' floor plan using my Sony 70-300G at 300mm from 15' away on my Sony a850. (See previous image)
I then scanned a portion of the extremely high resolution print. From the photograph of the print I inserted small sections of the image rastered from RAW.
To do that, I prepared the photograph twice from RAW by sharpening in ACR (left insert) and another version sharpened only using USM 200 0.4 02 (right insert) and up-sampled using nearest neighbor.
This is interesting because of how the differences in sharpening affect line width. In this experiment we can compare it to a known source.

(edit 2018) Newer versions of ACR, newer & higher-res cameras with no anti-aliasing filters like my a7RII and my newer higher micro-contrast FE 70-300G might (probably would) make a difference.
At the least, this marginally softer SAL 70-300G zoom combined with a lack of an anti-aliasing filter will emphatically change my initial 'ol time USM parameters to a significantly smaller amount and with a slightly smaller radius.


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Mister Pixel22-Mar-2012 16:51
Your assessment of ‘line weight’ is correct and I am unable to explain why the sharpening in ACR produces an excessively thin line. Either I used inappropriate parameters in the conversion and/or Adobe is trying to correct for dot gain in printing. I can’t conceive of this being a lens issue, although the original intent of this experiment was to test the lens. It’s plenty sharp at 300mm…at least at 15 feet. To me the PP using USM ( 200+, 0.4, 2 ) is much, much more accurate. More experimentation is needed.
Rich 21-Mar-2012 15:05
It appear that the left part sharpened to make the black line smaller (therefore distorting true size) and that the right image got thinker (thus distorting the true size).
Did you do both sharpening in RAW and then post with USM? If so, what does the thickness look like compared to the rest of the black circle?
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