Sharpening in ACR 7.1

I'm reading the part of Martin Evening's "Adobe Photoshop CS6 for Photographers" dealing with sharpening in ACR.  As in his previous edition for CS5, he seems to be saying that putting the Detail slider at 100 is akin to USM in PS, while placing it at 0 minimizes halos.  I would gather this means the 0 setting is deconvolution sharpening. 
As I recall, Eric Chan indicated that the settings were the other way round: 0 was akin to USM and 100 deconvolution. Which is which?
thanks,
grampus45

grampus45 wrote:
This would suggest that a significant use of masking would be appropriate in applying capture sharpening.  But many things I read, and many suggested 'presets,' tend to downplay or even ignore masking.
I would argue against the term "significant" and more likely call it a beneficial use of masking. You want to be sharpening edges and generally don't want to sharpen surfaces (which are broad areas of tone/color). The default for masking is zero because, well, Thomas decided that no masking should be applied at default but almost any image will benefit from having some edge masking used.
How much really depends on the edge frequency of the image…if you are shooting portraits you want a fairly high edge masking (40 or above). If you are shooting low ISO landscape images with a high frequency of image texture, you probably want less; 10-25 or so. But…that depends on the amount, radius, detail and noise reduction settings…you really can't give a range of settings for any single parameter because they all depend on each other...
grampus45 wrote:
We know from Bruce Fraser what the general principles of sharpening are.  What we need now is someone like Bruce to write a treatise on how to enact those principles, such as they are possible, with the sharpening facility in ACR. We can attempt to infer what's happening by moving the sliders themselves, but it's really going to take someone with "inside knowledge" to do the job properly. So far we only have vague hand waving.
I did...when I revised Bruce's Real World Image Sharpening book...which came out just before the PV 2010 noise reduction functionality (unfortunately). The aim is to get the image to look good at 1:1. That is the intent and design of the Detail panel in ACR/LR. And yes, it's tough because there are tons of cameras and tons of image types to deal with...yes, it's tough to evaluate just enough sharpening but not too much. You can't accomplish that with a few presets...you need to educate your eyes...no way around that.
And the other 2 phases of image sharpening, creative and output sharpening are further complicating factors. The ACR/LR creative sharpening is primitive but useful. The output sharpening in LR is actually very, very good. It's less good in ACR because of the limitations of the size functionality in ACR. Output sharpening MUST be done at the final output size...and sizing in ACR other than native are problematic.
The bottom line is to make the image look good at 1:1. Don't try to do over/under sharpening in the Detail panel, don't try to sharpen for effect or do creative sharpening and don't worry at all about output sharpening. If you are shooting low ISO on high rez cameras, you can sharpen more aggressively, the smaller the capture size and higher the ISO the more you need to be careful of setting the sharpening and noise reduction correctly.
The only generalizations I can make os that you do want to adjust all of the following; Amount, Radius, Detail, Edge Masking and Luminance Noise Reduction to get an optimal capture sharpening result. The numbers will vary by camera size, lens type, Exposure, ISO and shooting techniques. YMWV...

Similar Messages

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    BALawson wrote:
    Does ACR 100 sharpening = PS4 100 sharpening amount?
    No...

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