Sharpening With Aperture 3

Digital image sharp­ening may be the most com­pli­cated sub­ject for dig­ital pho­tog­ra­phers; per­haps even more com­pli­cated than color man­age­ment. Nevertheless, The Digital Photo Experience has tackled the issue in their Sharpening Saturday Lightroom tip. And so I’ll work to trans­late their points into Aperture here — their format is video, mine will be text and images.

Lightoom’s Sharpening Controls

Aperture’s Sharpen Controls

The sharp­ening con­trols are very dif­ferent between the two pro­grams even though they are attempting to do pretty much the same things.

Intensity is the same as Amount; both are sliders for “how much” sharp­ening to apply. Aperture’s Edges slider works some­what like Lightroom’s masking in that it defines what gets sharp­ened; how much of the detail in an image is to be con­sid­ered an “edge.”. The adjust­ment brick is enti­tled edge sharp­ening because that’s what Aperture wants to work on — edges. The Falloff slider is much like Lightroom’s Radius con­trol as it deter­mines how far away from an edge the sharp­ening effect is applied.

The rea­sons to use sharp­ening and the thought process behind how to apply it is, of course, the same for both pro­grams because what we’re trying to do in both cases is to post-process dig­ital images. You always what to work at 100% image mag­ni­fi­ca­tion to best judge the effects of sharpening.

One way the two are dif­ferent is in the number of places in the RAW pro­cessing pipeline at which sharp­ening is applied.

Aperture’s first sharp­ening adjust­ment is made right as the RAW image is first trans­lated. You can see that adjust­ment in the RAW Fine Tuning adjust­ment brick. This is where Aperture is cor­recting for the slight blur­ring cre­ated by the anti-alaising filter in front of the camera’s dig­ital image sensor.

After that, the Edge Sharpening adjust­ment brick kicks in. Different adjust­ments here are appro­priate for dif­ferent images. Typically “high detail” images, such as land­scapes and archi­tec­ture, need higher inten­si­ties with more of the image defined as an edge. “Low detail” images, espe­cially of people, would need lower inten­sity sharp­ening with less of the image defined as an edge.

Another type of sharp­ening is often called cre­ative sharp­ening and is done to draw the viewer’s atten­tion to cer­tain parts of the image. Often this sharp­ening might be to the eyes of the sub­ject. To apply this sharp­ening in Aperture, you can use the new Quick Adjustment Brush called Sharpen. What I prefer to do, how­ever, is to add another edge sharpen adjust­ment brick because I have more con­trol using the Intensity, Edges and Falloff sliders.

The final stage of sharp­ening is called output sharp­ening because it makes adjust­ments to account for the media used for output. Matte type photo papers tend to bleed ink slightly more than glossy photo papers and so need a bit more output sharp­ening to com­pen­sate. The screen is a poor image dis­play com­pared to a good photo paper and has much less res­o­lu­tion, so more sharp­ening is needed. Aperture does not output sharpen except as part of the print dialog.

Here the sliders are Amount for “how much” sharp­ening you want and Radius for how far away from an edge to effect.