CO sharpener or capture sharpener

[Marty Connelly]

I have been using Capture Sharpener since it came out. Yesterday I tried CO shapening and I had very good results. The question is should I skip capture sharpener and just use the output sharpener or should I use both.
By using CO's sharpener the file is smaller and it is being done while in the raw neff format. I am trying to perfect my workflow and this seems like a logical way to go.

Thanks

[Bruce Fraser]

If you want to do this, you're on your own. The sharpening performed by ALL raw converters is global, and steps pretty hard on the highlights and shadows, where PK Capture Sharpeners focus the sharpening on the midtones to leave headroom for the output sharpeners.

If file size is the main concern, you can flatten the image after Capture Sharpen.

[Marty Connelly]

Thanks Bruce, I guess there is a downside to using CO sharpener, I will stick to Capture Sharpener. what your telling me makes a lot of sense.

[photovis]

I have another related question using Photokit Capture Sharpen and Phase One Capture Pro. I have been a long time PhotoKit CS user. I had been using Nikon Capture with sharpening set to none and doing a initial Capture Sharpening on all the converted jpegs and then performing a PK Output Sharpening on jpegs after they have been sized and color corrected.

I recently purchased a Nikon D2x, a great camera when they resolve the white balance problems. As we all know, Nikon Capture is almost useless with the D2x files, so I have started to use the Mac version of Phase One's Capture Pro. I like it better then the Adobe Bridge and ACR 3.1. I have a hard time adjusting the density and color of images in ACR. Much easier in Capture Pro.

Capture Pro has a default setting for sharpening of Standard Look, Amount-25 and Threshold-3. I have set the Capture Pro Amount and Threshold setting's both to 0 but still have the Standard Look selected. I thought I read somewhere that a -25 for Amount might be needed to turn off shapening in Capture Pro.

This afternoon I processed several hundred RAW images into JPEGS and ran my Photoshop action to apply the Photoshop Capture Sharpener Sharpener Set- Digital Mid-Res Sharpen and Sharpener Effects- Midium Edge Sharp. The files looked nice and sharp. However, when I applied my normal Output Sharpening of Inkjet Output and Inkjet 300 Glossy, the files were oversharpened to the point of not being able to be used. If I just sharpened with the initial PK Capture Sharpener they looked sharp and printed nicely on my Epson 4000. Most of my images are of wedding clients and prints range in size from 4x6 to 10x15.

So, my questions are, where should I have the Capture Pro sharpening settings so no sharpening occurs when the Raw files are converted? What is the best resolution that I should use in Capture Pro when I make jpegs (240, 300, or 360 ppi)? And should I now be using the PK Capture Sharpener Set- Digital High-Res setting with the Nikon D2x and it's 12.5 megapixels.

I am using a Mac G5 Dual 2.0 ghz computer, 3gb RAM, OS 10.3.9 and Photoshop CS2.

[Bruce Fraser]

You definitely want to use Digital High-Res Sharpen on the D2X. Digital Mid-Res will oversharpen D2X files severely, as you discovered.