Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom, 2nd Edition

I was surprisingly underwhelmed by this book. I am normally a big fan of Jeff Schewe (see my Real World Camera RAW review for example) but this book really missed the mark for me. I really expected the same book layout presented in Real World Camera RAW, that is, a brief overview of the advantages of the proposed process, lots of in-depth examples to show the technical variations, and some additional "advanced" topics to help readers structure an improved process. Unfortunately, this book was plagued by a lack of focus and a theoretical approach that lacked substance.

The book seemed to get lost in esoteric and sometimes confusing examples that are often concluded with summary paragraphs with this basic theme of, "You could do it that way but it's not very good." I was left with the feeling that the authors included numerous examples and provided great detail just to debunk a specific technique. I don't really need 4 pages to get the point, simply recommend that we not use... Read more

Save for certain "special effects", sharpness, clarity and smooth tonal gradations are amongst the critical hallmarks of excellent photographs, and go to the heart of what distinguishes photography as an art form. If you never thought that anyone could fill over three hundred pages with technically essential information and instruction about sharpening photographs, think again because here it is, and it's really important for anyone who strives for excellence in their digital imaging work.

Much more than a cookbook on how to sharpen a photo (though it does that too), this book, now in its second and expanded edition, describes in a way that's easy to understand the very fundamentals of digital imaging technology and image structure which give rise to the need for a multi-stage and multi-purposed sharpening workflow; from there the authors go on to present in considerable detail the optimal techniques for implementing it, so that those of us who read from cover to cover will... Read more

I consider myself a fairly competent user of Photoshop (PS), Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which is a plug-in that comes installed in PS, and Lightroom (LR), but one area where I didn't feel post-processing in my bones was image sharpening, which is the process of adjusting images to both overcome the image softness inherent in digital photography and to make artistic adjustments. I'd read the first edition of this book, and understood the difference between capture, creative and output sharpening, but wasn't always sure what those sliders in Unsharp Mask were doing for me. Since that first edition, Adobe had improved the sharpening facilities in ACR and LR. It seemed like visiting the second edition was in order.

After explaining what sharpening is and why images need to be sharpened, Schewe, building on the work of the late Bruce Fraser, explains multipass sharpening and the somewhat different approaches taken by the main PS, ACR and LR software. The author then describes... Read more