Like any good chef, a photographer knows that adding the right amount of “seasoning” to an image can make or break the final result. In this case, the seasoning we’re talking about is sharpening. Sharpening can take your images from “meh” to “WOW!”, but if used too liberally, it can bypass “WOW” and move straight into “oof”.
So some of you may wonder if you should even sharpen at all — I mean, you’ve sharpened your images in Lightroom, why mess up a good thing?? The truth is that you should sharpen a JPG file every time you resize it. Sharpening affects the contrast at the pixel level and refines the edges between areas of different tonal values. So if you have your original 6000×4000 pixel image and you apply sharpening, it will look amazing! But if you then resize it down to 1800×1200 pixels, you’ve changed the overall number of pixels in the image, and you’ve wiped out any prior sharpening.
Storytailor enables you to apply just the right amount of sharpening to your images in Collage Mode and Batch Mode in two formats — Basic Sharpening and Expert Sharpening.
Basic Sharpening
This is simple and easy to use. One slider from ‘a little’ to ‘a lot’. At both ends of the spectrum, you’ll see that there is plenty of range from soft right through to overly sharpened. Adjust the slider and hit ‘Refresh’ to preview changes.
Expert Sharpening – or Two Pass Sharpening
The Expert Sharpening feature offers two passes of sharpening, each highly configurable.
This mechanism is similar (but not the exact same) to the Unsharp Mask (USM) function in Lightroom or Photoshop.
If you’ve used USM then you can easily map your settings in Lightroom or Photoshop across to Storytailor (just copy the values), and get pretty close – you might have to tweak them a little to get it looking spot on.
Often with two pass sharpening, you can have a wider but softer reach for the first pass, then a narrow but more intense reach for the second. The defaults we’ve set for Expert Sharpening mode reflect this.
Conclusion
So just like how seasoning a dish can make or break the meal, the same is true for sharpening your images. Too little sharpening and your images look “blah”, too much and they can look “oof”. So make sure you season your sharpening setting to taste, to ensure your images look their best, every time!