Another new sharpening tool....and workflow management

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/revie ... ener.shtml

I just read this review, less than a full week after I purchased focalblade. I will not be purchasing Photokit Sharpener because I currently already have Focalblade as well as Fred Miranda's Sharpening Tool + Fred Miranda's SI and WP tools, so I really don't need yet another. But this one looks quite impressive as well in how it handles the workflow.

My workflow is pretty defined now, finally
1) I take a .CRW file, go into CaptureOne DLSR LE and convert it to a tiff, adjuting contast, brightness, saturation etc, but apply absolutely zero sharpening at this stage.
2) I open photoshop, and do any cropping necessary and then use Fred Miranda's Web Presenter Pro to resize the image to 650 on the largest size, again with no sharpening between resizes.
3) I then use Photowiz's Colorwasher 1.02 to make sure the color cast on the image is correct, as well as make any final adjustments to contrast, saturation, etc.
4) Finally I use Photowiz's Focalblade to sharpen the image, make sure there are no halo's, bring out shadows, enhance highlights and midtones, etc. I am still learning the intricacies fo the two Photowiz tools, but I have found this workflow for me provides by far the most superior quality of images to date.

Chris Fagyal wrote: 1) I take a .CRW file, go into CaptureOne DLSR LE and convert it to a tiff, adjuting contast, brightness, saturation etc, but apply absolutely zero sharpening at this stage.
2) I open photoshop, and do any cropping necessary and then use Fred Miranda's Web Presenter Pro to resize the image to 650 on the largest size, again with no sharpening between resizes.
3) I then use Photowiz's Colorwasher 1.02 to make sure the color cast on the image is correct, as well as make any final adjustments to contrast, saturation, etc.
4) Finally I use Photowiz's Focalblade to sharpen the image, make sure there are no halo's, bring out shadows, enhance highlights and midtones, etc.

The problem I see with this work flow is that it leaves you with a very nice web image for your trouble. If you ever needed to print the image, you get to do everything again. I suggest the following modifications.

1. Split #2 into two parts, the cropping and the resizing. put the resizing between #3 and #4.
2. After #3, save the image as a photoshop file as this is a full size, cropped, color corrected version of the image.

This modification will allow you to produce any size image from the corrected file without having to correct the file again. All it will cost you is space and it will allow you to produce the same image at different sizes without having to try to remember everything you did to produce the image the first time.

BTW, my workflow is similar but I do not use Capture One because it doesn't work for all my cameras and every example I have seen of a Nikon Image converted by it has looked awful. So I use Nikon Capture instead. Also, if I think I will need to upsize the image eventually, I like to do it in Capture against the RAW file that is unsharpened. I've been regularly producing 6 mp versions of my D1H images and 13.5 mp versions of my D100 images. I know it doesn't add to the detail in the file but I think it is much easier to adjust the image when it is upsized like this.

Tony,

I guess I should have called it my "Create image for web workflow"

I don't do a whole lot of printing, so I never really thought about it as you stated, though it makes perfect sense. I store all of my images as 16 bit 36.2M tiff files which CaptureOne creates from the .CRW files. CaptureOne seems to do a pretty good job of contrast/color/brightness etc adjustment for my 10D files, Colorwasher just fine tunes a lot of things, and sometimes does things I don't particularily care for, so I actually skip step 3 sometimes on some images (it tends to destroy early morning sunrise lighting if it detects what it believes to be an "orange cast").