This is unusual. In Capture 100 at 100% it looks very nicely sharpened.
We got that much snow in 24 hours. The people where I was a pastor were named 'People of the Snow' by their neighbors.
What a beautiful house and garden (yours is nice to Dan!).
Is the pic over-sharpened or is it just my eyes fresh from sleep?
It looks oversharpened to me, but it is hard to tell at this resolution.
What sharpening method did you use? Some software packages offer multiple methods, and they produce different results, so just telling us that you used Capture 1 doesn't really convey what you did.
I don't know whether you have the ability or inclination to do this, but it would be helpful for folks to look at the full-sized image so that the can see it at 100% also. The ideal would be to share both the a full-sized JPEG using the editing settings you already used and the raw file so that people can try different sharpening. You would need a place to store it, like a public folder on dropbox. If you have a way to do that, I would be happy to explore it and post results if I find anything interesting, although I might not be able to get to it for a few days.
I was at a winter photography seminar last week and was reminded of some of the benefits of winter photography:
1. Golden hour and blue hour occur at a much more reasonable time of day at this time of year. Morning blue hour starts just before 7:00AM and finishes about 15 minutes later. Morning golden hour starts at around 7:10AM and ends at 8:15AM. In the evening golden hour starts at 3:30PM and ends at around 4:20PM. Evening blue hour ends at around 4:40PM.
Not only that, but often we get clear blue skies, so shooting at those times gives us beautiful light that is unobstructed by clouds.
2. There are no nasty stinking or biting bugs out to bother us photographers.
3. With snow on the ground, we have a huge white reflector helping us fill in the shadows.
4. With the ponds, streams, rivers and lakes frozen, we can get to all kinds of places where we can't get to in the summer when the water is liquid.
5. Tracking wildlife is so much easier, especially after a fresh snowfall, as animal tracks are easy to spot.
6. No leaves on trees to block our view.
The list goes on and on. I'd didn't really buy the rationalization either....
As for the sharpening, I agree with the others that the image is significantly oversharpened. When doing import sharpening, the objective is to overcome the image of the camera's AA filter and the demozaicing process. This is a very subtle sharpening process and I rarely exceed 100% and a radius of 1 in my settings. I don't sharpen in the raw convertor / parametric editor as the sharpening process cannot be controlled locally where it is required. In fact, I will often exclude the clouds and water when import sharpening, as I generally want those areas of the image to be soft.
The bulk of my sharpening occurs as in-process sharpening in parts of the image that are highly localized in places where this is required. This cannot be performed in a parametric editor.
Finally I generally restrict output sharpening to images that I print to compensate for ink bleed and resizing. I tend to not output sharpen anything I post to the web as I cannot control the devices people are going to look at my images at (size, resolution, etc.).
That certainly might explain it, or at least part of it.Check the output sharpening in Export Images (Under the Recipe section then Adjustments tab in that screen). You may have it set to something other than No Output Sharpening
Manfred, I have to admit that I am less enthusiastic about winter than I used to be, but I do appreciate the first two things you mentioned. It's really very nice to be able to get sunset pictures and be back for dinner, and here on the east coast, the clear air on many winter nights is a nice luxury after the haze and humidity--and the color distortions it causes--we have to cope with much of the time in warm weather.
Now if only today's teenagers were as interested as my cohort was in shoveling snow for cash...
BINGO! C.O. has an ew export filter designed for the web that I have been exploring. It includes output sharpening. I just turned it off.
What a beautiful image, Brian; thoroughly enjoyed it!!!