I am one of those ‘fortunate’ people who can read technical books and absorb a lot of information from them. Currently I am ploughing my way through 3 books on Photoshop and Lightroom. Two items that opened my eyes were on ‘post import sharpening’ and noise reduction.
I had always been a bit disappointed with the sharpness of my lenses. Not any more! Apart from snapshots, I am now applying a little judicious sharpening at the import stage:
The left side of the image shows the basic sharpness of an ‘out of the camera’ jpg image. As you can see, this is showing some blurring of the fine detail. I could increase the sharpness in-camera but I am concerned about the lack of control and the risk of over-doing it.
The right side shows a jpg from the raw conversion. For this I adjusted the sharpness in the raw conversion program – this is a lot better and shows the detail I was expecting from this lens. It’s a bit late to go back over the past 4 years worth of photos…
The other factor that has been concerning me was the noise:
On the left is a 3-exposure hdr using the camera produced jpg images and default settings on the hdr software – soft but little noise.
On the right is the raw converted jpg files run through the hdr software with the default settings – sharper but the noise is quite pronounced.
The middle one is the same as the rightmost but the the hdr noise reduction switched on – much better…
This just shows that it is always worth studying to improve techniques and different ways of doing things. Excuse me while I get on with reading the next 1000+ pages…