tomasis said:
Hello I got some weeks to play with Rd1. Epson Photo Raw is very simple but easy to work with. One problem I find that when you load up any ERF file with Photoraw and I get impression that the image looks quite sharp and shows such nice textures. But when I save this as Tiff and jpg then sharpness (crispy textures) is gone with those files. Sometimes tonality is messed up. I often envy M8 users that they don't need process files a lot regarding sharpness due lack of the antialiasing filter. I find that edge enchance +1 and unsharp mask 70% works well for me but I'm not yet sure if I go too far or viceversa. It'd be good way comparing wet print with digital but I still don't have a chance to this yet. So how do you use software to get out max lens sharpness without getting any artifacts? At other words, filter away the antiliasing filter based on D100 sensor.
I'm not so sure your issue is specific to the R-D 1 or PhotoRaw -- it sounds more like the lack of sharpness is coming into the way you are generating your TIFF or JPEG files.
(You can't -- and don't want to -- "filter away the antialiasing filter"; it has very little effect on image details large enough to be resolved by the sensor. Its purpose is to filter out details too small for the sensor to image, so they don't cause moire patterns and color fringing on finely-textured subjects.)
Now, where your sharpness is going: If you are saving your images at a smaller pixel size than the camera's original data, some of the fine detail will be lost to
interpolation. To make the image smaller, the software has to mathematically average the values of a large number of pixels to make them into a smaller number of pixels. This averaging process removes some of the fine differences between pixel values.
Also, your output device -- whether it be a printer, a monitor, or whatever -- does its own interpolation in order to match the number of image pixels to the number of device pixels, and this also causes loss of apparent sharpness. So for example, if you have a 3000 x 2000-pixel image and you view it in an 800x600-pixel window on your monitor, the computer's video display driver is going to average down 6 million pixels into 480, 000 pixels, and some appearance of sharpness will get lost in the mathematics of this.
What all this should tell you is that, unfortunately, there is no single magic setting that will give you the "best" sharpness for every way you might want to view your image! What you need to do is sharpen the image to give the best results for the way you are going to use it: viewing on a monitor, printing at a small size, printing at a large size, etc.
(This is one of the big advantages of shooting in raw format -- you can save your original raw file as your "negative," and generate from it results that you sharpen exactly the right amount for how you are going to use them.)
The way I normally handle sharpening is to do it either in Adobe Photoshop or in Adobe Lightroom (which is what I use to manage all my raw files.) If I am making an image to post on RFF, for example, I always first reduce it to be no more than 560 pixels wide (which is a size that looks good on RFF) and then I use Photoshop's "smart sharpen" filter at whatever setting makes it look good on my monitor on that size. The Smart Sharpen filter is pretty smart about sharpening details rather than image noise, so the settings are not ultra-critical -- I just pick what looks good.
For making prints, I apply the sharpening settings in Lightroom to get a print that looks sharp. At first you have to do this by making test prints, because that's the only way to see the final effect. After you get a bit more experience, you will know what settings work best for prints of different sizes.
These techniques apply to any software you might use, not just Photoshop and Lightroom. They also apply to any digital images, not just those from the R-D 1; you have to do this with ANY digital camera to get the sharpest results! The basics are that to get the best results, you have to choose sharpening settings tailored to your output, and you have to judge the results by looking at that output (in other words, you can't judge the best settings for a print by looking at your monitor; you have to look at a print, at least until you have had some practice.)
Sorry if this has made it sound more complicated than you want, but in practice it is pretty easy once you have done it a few times and have learned what settings work best for different kinds of output. (One of the things I like about Lightroom is that you can save combinations of often-used settings and apply them with one click.)
The main thing you need to know is that your R-D 1 can produce results that look very, very sharp, regardless of what type of file you save. You just need to make sure you are following the right procedure for the type of output you want, which would be necessary no matter what type of digital camera you used.
