Sharpening is one of those terms that often makes photography purists shiver. After all, if a camera and the lens are doing their job properly, the picture should naturally be sharp and require no further processing, right?
Well, yes and no. Ideally this would always be the case. In a perfect digital world, the picture would be perfectly sharp, perfectly exposed, and the color levels would all be perfectly recorded by your camera.
Sadly, the world of the digital photographer is often times less than perfect.
The sceince of photography is pretty fluid and the tools are not always calibrated exactly to our liking. Sharpening is almost always applied in-camera. A certain amount is dialed in by the manufacturer in-camera and is performed by the filter overtop of the image sensor. However, camera makers need to find a balance. Too much sharpening can cause moiré with certain subject matter. Too little sharpening will cause customers to complain about soft images.
That’s why most digital cameras have a sharpening control, to allow you to manipulate the amount of sharpening that is applied to the image. Usually the amounts that can be applied are harmless levels of sharpening, and won’t do any damage to the image. Still, the process of software sharpening In-Camera does alter the image in a way that cannot be repaired or altered unless you shoot RAW.
Going beyond that is sharpening done in post-processing. Technically this is the same process, but it’s performed a step later, with the difference being that it gives you a little more control over how the image will end up looking.
So should you use sharpening? Yes. The in-camera sharpening is likely set to a level that won’t harm your picture even if you crank it up and max it out. The post-processing sharpening in most software needs to be used with a bit more care, since too much sharpening can drop vital information and render a picture useless, but it’s also a handy tool when used conservatively.
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May 23rd, 2008 at 8:30 am
To mutter utter shame, I had no idea you could sharpen in-camera. I’ve always used Photoshop for that sort of thing. Definitely gonna try this out. Thanks for the tip!
-Chris
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:01 am
[...] Use of In-Camera Sharpening Fotohacker The usage of Sharpening right in your camera explained. [...]
July 1st, 2008 at 4:15 am
Sharpening out of camera is a better practice, because in-camera sharpening is a destructive process that destroys detail. It would be like converting to black and white in-camera; you don’t do it because then you can’t go back to color, or in this case, you can’t go back to unsharpened.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:18 am
[...] Use of in-camera sharpening [...]
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I had no idea you could do this either. You learn something new every day!
August 27th, 2008 at 9:57 am
I agree, if you do it in the camera you can’t revert back. I always wait until I do anything to the pic until I get on my computer that way you can save different versions of it.
But I do recommend playing with all the settings on your camera. It always you to do things with your camera you never thought you could.
October 3rd, 2008 at 6:47 am
Looked on my Sony Alpha’s and cant find an option on there, have I just missed it?
December 12th, 2008 at 10:18 am
There are two sides to this… If you sharpen in-camera, you manipulate the RAW data before converting/compressing to jpeg. Rather than destroying detail, your camera is just interpreting the data it got off the sensor in a different way before applying it to the image. On the other hand, the camera’s processor isn’t able to run as powerful a sharpening algorithm as your desktop, so it can’t always employ the best sharpening. I use slight in-camera for my jpegs because I don’t want to sharpen every photo I take in Photoshop, and as Jason says, it’s not enough to hurt your image.
Without getting into a pro/con RAW debate, if you sharpen in Photoshop (et al.) on a jpeg, you are working on a converted, compressed file, and sharpening will not be as effective nor as good looking, in general, as working on a RAW file, so if you’re worried about it, just shoot RAW or RAW+jpeg and either see for yourself which you prefer, or just always save the raw so that if you don’t like the in-camera sharpening on a photo down the road, you can go back to the original RAW!