Sharpening and Post-processing

Someone asked me recently whether I had sharpened the pepper and water photos (or some of my other photos). The honest answer is I do sharpen if that’s the only way to save the image but generally I prefer to use a light hand in post-processing. Obviously, I’m not talking about HDR, which is heavily post-processed. For ordinary photography, I crop and often increase contrast but usually that’s all that’s needed. I’m not a total purist about getting everything exactly right in the camera, especially if I’m taking a grab shot on the run, but if the pixels aren’t there, well, all the Photoshopping in the world isn’t going to bring them back!

Here’s a photo that needed sharpening badly. I took it while walking by and in relatively dim light, so it wasn’t very clear. But the subject matter interested me enough that I thought it was salvageable, so I cropped,lightened, and sharpened it. Oh, one bit of advice I picked up: Do the sharpening last. It messes with the pixels, so you don’t want to do it too early in the processing.

In bright light my chances of getting a sharp photo are much higher, not too surprisingly. This photo of the Dome of the Rock was taken from the roof of the Aish haTorah yeshiva with a Canon 55-250mm lens, handheld. 250mm, f/8, 1/500 sec. The distance between me and the building? 850 meters, or about half a mile. Yet, you can still see the logo on the TV satellite dish and the chips on the tiles.

To view it full-size, click the photo to go to the Flickr page, click All Sizes, then click Original. It would have been sharper with a tripod, no doubt about it, but I was running around without a tripod that day.

Below is a processed version. I cropped out the antenna, straightened the photo, and increased the contrast slightly using Picasa. This is a downsized version (1600×1067, since it takes me too long to upload full-size photos).