Raw and Photoshop sharpening suggestion-bear

I am not a sharpening expert so looking for advice how to pursue the best sharpness workflow for a nice black bear encounter, but unfortunately handholding my 500 F4 at 1/60 second at F7.1, IS1, ISO 400. Realizing the final sharpening is output dependent, assume I want to make an 11 x 14 print and an 850 px x 590 px 72ppi web image. I realize that sharpening does not make up for softness from technique, but would love to make a final pleasing photo of this experience. Most important, I believe the eyes were captured sharply so perhaps the body fur and nose is what needs the most attention.

1.Converting in ACR CS5, how do I best determine an appropriate capture sharpening setting to help offset some softness from the capture method.  Various sliders I have read about but cannot see what would be ideal.

2. In Photoshop CS5, should I consider Smart Sharpen, a high pass process, or my usual USM? 


If anyone wants to play with my Raw image, I could provide only a huge thank you!

This was done with USM of 500, 0.2, 0 and then a second round of 100, 0.2, 0.


 http://www.jnphoto.net/New-Image/New-Images/i-6SSWhF9/A

Thank you

Jeff

Nice capture Jeff --- in addition to sharpening, you might also consider shadow/highlight contrast adjustment, which can be important with the dark fur. I've sent you a PM. - Gary

Hello Jeff,

There are no universal magic settings for sharpening, not even a set of the optimum settings for one entire image.
Also, the tools in photoshop do not actually sharpen, they increase accutance or edge contrast. True sharpening requires iterative deconvolution, a compute intensive process. Photoshop's smart sharpen is reportedly a combination of unsharp mask and a one-iteration deconvolution, and depending on slider settings, a blend of the two.

I favor Richardson-Lucy deconvolution as I have a lot of experience with it, and many images on my web site have had it applied, combined with unsharp mask.

For more information, see my 5-part series on sharpening:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/ima ... ing-intro/

Roger

Roger, I noticed your reference to iterative deconvolution and immediately thought of Bart van der Wolf. He, and a number of others at the Open Photography Forum, are reliable sources of information that often covers subjects in greater depth than can be found elsewhere on the internet. 

Thank you for the link to your "Image Sharpening Introduction". It's quite informative and very well written.

Jeff,

There are a couple "go to" sharpening settings I use for quick and easy.

With Photoshop I like the smart sharpen filter. I do radius of 1px and usually end up at around 100 for the sharpening level. Sometimes I push it a little more or sometimes a little less.

There is a more extensive technique where you create layer masks. You can do a google search for this (and if you have trouble, I have a tutorial that a friend made for me... I just want to ask his permission before sending it). The downside to this is that it is pretty intensive. I don't love editing, so I rarely do this technique, but the nice thing about this is that you can sharpen your subject, while at the same time reducing noise and sharpness on the rest of the image.

Lightroom has great sharpening tools as well. To get nice sharpening effects with LR I usually set the clarity to 10, vibrance to 15 and slide the sharpening tool to 90 or so. Then for subjects with fine fur or feather detail I will slide the details slider to the right until satisfied. (The masking slider with LR is a little lacking though unfortunately, and I don't like the result) If you push "alt" (with a pc) when moving the sharpening sliders it will show you exactly what areas of the image are being manipulated with each tool.

I'm no pro at any of this, but if you want to send along a file to play with then I'm willing.

Happy shooting,