gr8, thanks for sharing Chris

Just tried this out. Very good indeed Chris. Thanks for the tut.

What is good starting point for setting the sliders in unsharp mask.

curious as to why your editing in 8 bit rather than 16 bit which is lossless, is there a reason for it Chris that i am missing?

curious as to why your editing in 8 bit rather than 16 bit which is lossless, is there a reason for it Chris that i am missing?

No reason, just the first file that took my fancy, and it happened to be an 8 bit jpeg ;-) Plus those that would normally use 16 bit for editing, wouldn't really need this tutorial anyway

lol No offence taken

I always work from 16 bit for my images, and save working files as PSD's. Switching colour modes can effect the image, but the effect can be written on a pin head, it's that small ;-) The key to preserving the image as much as possible, is to preserve the layers you work on, and not to flatten an image when prompted to (when converting between colour modes).

To be honest, unless you are pixel peeping at images, the degrading issue isn't something anybody need worry about. IMHO for everyday editing of images, shot with every day cameras, and being viewed on every day screens or prints etc etc, it's just something people would never notice or need to worry about.

How many film photographers used to view their images via a microscope, so they could see every single grain on the film? We tend to get too obsessed with zooming in to fine detail on a pixel by pixel basis, just because it is now possible. If the image looks good on screen or print, that is all that matters. What is going on at a pixel by pixel or mode by mode basis, means nothing to someone just viewing the image.

Hell we can't even claim to see the same image on here, that we originally uploaded. WHY? Because ALL web browsers disregard the colour space of images, and rewrite them "on the fly" to sRGB. Even if the uploaded image is optimised for web use, and saved as sRGB, the browser will still convert it to sRGB again, thus degrading the image. Add that to the fact that 95% of sites process the images via server side software like GD, and your original image has been reprocessed 3 times before it appears in your browser window. So it's a never ending battle that your every day viewer is never going to worry about, understand, or really care about

This is what I need. Thanks. now off to try it

Hello,

And thanks for this great tip.  I have a question though if i may... i always resize my images in photoshop from 4000 x 3000 down to about 1300 x 975 for forums etc, so do i resize first and then sharpen, as sharpening before and then resizing seems to ruin the effect.

Thanks Col .

Thanks for sharing.