Hi Stan, I may have mis-spoken or at minimum, been misunderstood.
You are correct that sharpening should occur prior to printing. Saving the image sharpened is not necessary, and may, in fact, be detrimental since sharpening adjustments vary depending upon final output size and other factors. They may even depend upon the printer type and driver software. I cannot give you absolutes in terms settings in using unsharp masking, because it depends upon many factors. Some include the type of image or subject matter and contract, color intensity, etc, the size the imagine is going to be reproduced to, and the scanning resolution used, the type of source material (the film base used) and indeed the type of scanner and if things like dICE is used or not. By trial and error, I have a "sense" of the settings depending on these factors, and how the image looks on the screen at differing magnifications. However, my principal point is this: All CCD based scanners tend to introduce softening which can in part be recaptured via unsharp masking. This softness is not a defect in focus or optics or the CCD, but is intentionally introduced to reduce the amount of noise and artifacting (Nyquist errors) that develop in the analogue to digital transfer which occurs in the scanning process. No image should be compared until optimum unsharp masking is accomplished because some manufacturers will uses some USM to make their scanners appear to have higher sharpness and resolution when actually introducing this higher focal accuracy may add unnecessary and even undesirable artifacts which cannot later be removed. Keeping the image unsharpened for storage does indeed allow you to adjust those measurements to the output method and size. Art Stan Schwartz wrote: > A while back, Art mentioned sharpening a scanned transparency image > before saving it--to restore some of the loss of sharpness inherent in > the SS4000 scan. I am curious to know what degree of sharpening you use, > in Photoshop terms re: %,radius and threshold, for this task. > > I've usually reserved sharpening as the last step before printing, > leaving my archived image unsharpened. > > Stan Schwartz > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
