Resizing images

[Colin Southern]

Absolutely not. I, along with Hans (and the many others who'll be looking at this), will appreciate that what we're getting here is the sort of quality tutorial that lots of people would give an arm and a leg for.

Thanks Donald - always nice to be appreciated

Point taken. And agreed. But what we've been provided with here is a baseline - a starting point. Of course, we all have to work with each image we have and recognise that we must to do the work to produce the final product. It doesn't get handed to us on a plate and there can be no magic formula for every image.

Yes. A "magic Formula" would be nice, but unfortunately there are just too many variables. I'm a big fan of what we over here call "suck it and see" - sometimes you can push it a little too far and get frosting on high-frequency components where as other times you can whack the radius waaaay up and get the likes of some seriously dramatic clouds. Trial and error - only way to get experience. And of course a good "trick" to always keep in mind is how you can sharpen an image until one bit looks good (at the expense of other bits) and then just use the history brush to roll back the bits that the sharpening shouldn't have been applied to -- really powerful stuff, and yet drop-dead-simple to do.

But, it's this sort of exchange that, I'm sure, lies behind an awful lot of people who join this site talking about the quality of the help and support.

A member for almost a year (11 weeks of which as a non-smoker - just to remind you ... and boast) and I'm enjoying it more than ever.

Great to hear - hope we get many more like you. To be honest, this touches on something I agonise over -- a few of us post a lot more than many others and it's a difficult balancing act; try too hard and other capable members end up thinking "why bother posting when one of the regulars will just jump in in an hour or two anyway", whereas if we don't do our best to help - and others don't chip in - then the site becomes unresponsive to the needs of the people seeking help (and they go elsewhere) - so always a pleasure when people jump in and engage in discussions like this - throw ideas around - and especially challenge everyone's thinking

Well done on the non-smoking - I'll bet you're starting to feel a lot better because of it?

[Hans]

So - for a quick and dirty workflow - you might have something like this ...

- original image = 4500 x 3000 pixels

- Apply capture sharpening: 300% @ 0.3 pixels

- Apply creative/content sharpening: 40% @ 4 pixels

- Down-sample to 900 x 600 pixels

- Apply output sharpening: 300% @ 0.3 pixels

Needs to be tweaked depending on the image

I love it when you talk dirty, Colin
That is a great starting point. I feel the heavens have opened! You have given me the frame of reference that I needed. I'll pull out of this discussion now and mull over what you have given me. I've learned so much in the week and a half I've been digital, but most in the last two days thanks to this forum.

Donald, I agree heartily with your assessment of this site and its moderators and administrators. Thanks for your input, it helps to know I'm not the only one yet to perfect these things...and congrats on the quiting! No filthy habit for 3 mths. If you can do three months you can do 3 years, and if you can do three years you can do 30. The worst is over now (from experience) take a long deep breath and enjoy the rest of your life in good health.

Hans

[Colin Southern]

I love it when you talk dirty, Colin
That is a great starting point. I feel the heavens have opened! You have given me the frame of reference that I needed. I'll pull out of this discussion now and mull over what you have given me. I've learned so much in the week and a half I've been digital, but most in the last two days thanks to this forum.

Digital is definately a learning curve - from capture to processing - to printing. The thing I always find about photography though is how humbling it is ... there will always be people we can all learn from, which inspires me to pass on what I've been priviliged to learn from those well above my level, as well as learning more myself.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Hans and Donald,

I'll try to do a good "Dave" impression for a minute ...

ACR has 9 "tabs" under PS, but (off memory) only the first 2 under PSE. Having said that, I seldom go past the first tab anyway - and - what's on the other 7 tabs can probably be duplicated to a large degree in PSE anyway.

Yeah, not bad Colin

ACR 5.x (available for use with PSE 6, 7 or 8) now has three; the Basic, Detail and Camera Calibration, but I only use the first two.

The thing about the Detail tab is that although I agree with Colin, you cannot do the 'necessary' 300/0.3 capture sharpen with it (because minimum radius is 0.5, which is too much), it also contains the Noise Reduction sliders.

Now (I think) these are worth using because they work in a similar way to Neat Image (something to do with "wavelets"), so although you cannot select which bit of the image it takes as a noise reference, it still does a pretty good job of reducing noise without destroying fine detail.

Trial and error - only way to get experience. And of course a good "trick" to always keep in mind is how you can sharpen an image until one bit looks good (at the expense of other bits) and then just use the history brush to roll back the bits that the sharpening shouldn't have been applied to -- really powerful stuff, and yet drop-dead-simple to do.

Definitely support the trial and error approach, but the bad news is that the history brush function seems only to be available in Photoshop CS3 or CS4, not Elements, not even 8 it seems

So if you need to sharpen different areas with different settings in Elements, you're going to have to use layers, selections and/or masks to achieve it.

If starting out, stick to conservative whole image sharpening at first, then progress to this later as you become adept at selecting areas and/or using layers and masks. I guess what I am advising is; don't try running before you can walk, or a cut knee may ensue (a metaphor for becoming overwhelmed by it all). Digital is a big learning curve (and I'm still near the bottom), but equally, don't become 'stuck in a rut' either - start experimenting just as soon as you have one skill 'under control'.

Great to hear - hope we get many more like you. To be honest, this touches on something I agonise over -- a few of us post a lot more than many others and it's a difficult balancing act; try too hard and other capable members end up thinking "why bother posting when one of the regulars will just jump in in an hour or two anyway", whereas if we don't do our best to help - and others don't chip in - then the site becomes unresponsive to the needs of the people seeking help (and they go elsewhere) - so always a pleasure when people jump in and engage in discussions like this - throw ideas around - and especially challenge everyone's thinking

Well said, so it's not just me

As Donald says (you're not alone), you can be going along reasonably happy then discover you've missed something everyone else seems to be doing. It happens all the time.

Cheers,

[Colin Southern]

The thing about the Detail tab is that although I agree with Colin, you cannot do the 'necessary' 300/0.3 capture sharpen with it (because minimum radius is 0.5, which is too much

Sorry - forgot to mention - this is one thing that I do is PS, not ACR for this very reason. Seems quite strange to me in that apparantly this was changed in ACR so that people could do capture sharpening, so I haven't quite reconciled that part yet.