The tweak

Warning: If you have no interest in processing images, then read no further. 🔗

Tradition has it that wisdom is passed down through the generations. Well, not in our family; in our family it is passed up.

My main contribution to the upbringing of The Son was to impress upon him the importance of always having a can of WD-40 to hand. In return he has provided me with guidance on a number of topics, including how to make my photos look better. I could pass this wisdom back up the line to my father, but he is long gone and never held a camera anyway, so I will share it with you.

How do you look at your photos? If you are like me you mainly obsess over them on a computer monitor, often zoomed in at 100% so I can fret over the flaws. And how do others see your photos? If you are like me, then they view a reduced version via the web; perhaps on Facebook, Pattaya Days or via email.

If you want your photos to look wonderful full size, perhaps for printing large prints or just to make you feel good when you do your zooming in thing; then I can’t help you. There is plenty of information and many pieces of software that will help you in your quest to produce a wall-sized poster of your art. But if you are looking to produce good looking images at the sort of size you share on the web, then this might be for you.

The Son told me about this after I kept complaining about his photos. We both shot with a GF1 and the same lenses, but his photos always looked crisper than mine. Ignoring the fact that he has a better “eye” for composition than his father, whatever he shot just looked better on the screen. How?

Here’s how:

First, you will need Photoshop. Either the several thousand dollar boxed set of the latest Creative Suite, or a 100 baht copy of some version. Naturally, I recommend the former and use the latter. And you will need a photo to work on.

Whatever software you use to process your photos (I use Lightroom), get the following out of the way first:

1. Make any adjustments you want to the image (cropping, exposure compensation etc.)
2. Remove any noise. If you have noise and have to reduce it, the result will always be a softer image, and the tweak will help resolve that. There are a number of software applications for noise removal, but I find Lightroom to be an adequate solution.
3. If your software has any pre-specified sharpening, remove it. For example, Lightroom has a default 25% sharpening which you should remove by pushing the slider back to zero.

This is how the develop panel in Lightroom looks before I export, no sharpening and some noise reduction:

From Lightroom, I export full-size as a PSD and then open that file in Photoshop.

The tweak has four steps:

1. An initial reduction in the size of the image which will include some mild sharpening.
2. Sharpen
3. Reduce the size of the image again to the final size required, this step will also include some mild sharpening
4. Convert to JPEG and astound the world.

As you work through this, it may seem rather a lot of work to do on every photo. But you only have to do it once. Save the steps as an Action and then just apply the Action every time you want to use the tweak. More about Actions here.

This is the image I am going to tweak:

It was shot in a dark environment at ISO 1600, so I had to remove some of the noise, leaving the image looking a little soft.

So, load it into Photoshop and the first step is to reduce the size. Go to Image/Image size and make the length of the longest side (as this is a portrait image, choose the height) to 2,000 pixels.

Tick the boxes as shown and make sure you choose Bicubic Sharper, this will lightly sharpen the image as it is reduced in size. Click OK.

On to step 2, the main sharpening. First, we are going to change the colour mode of the image to Lab. Go to Image and change the colour from RGB to Lab.

If you want to know more about Lab mode, then Google will keep you busy for hours; all you need to know for the tweak is that it a good colour mode for sharpening.

Next step, head across onto to your menus, select Channels and you will see all the Lab channels highlighted. Click on Lightness so that it is the only channel highlighted, and note that your image has turned to greyscale.

Now it’s sharpening time. Select Filter/Sharpen/Smart Sharpen:

And you will get this:

Make sure you have the various options set as shown above, apart from the sliders which need a bit of discussion.

Radius: 1.2px as shown works well for 12 megapixel Micro Four Thirds size sensors. For larger sensors, like the X100, I find a lower value, around 0.9, works better.

Amount: Play around with this value. You will probably need more than 40 to make a difference, and more than 60 may start to degrade your image. As my test image has been softened by noise removal I am using quite a high value.

There are many things that can influence the “amount” settings. Different lenses, perhaps a bit of camera shake, noise reduction, all can impact how much you need to sharpen. After a bit of experience you will learn what values work best for your images. Click OK when you are happy with the preview.

Sharpening done, go back to Image/Mode and change the colour mode back to RGB.

Step 3, and we are now going to bring the image down to the final size and do some mild sharpening along the way.

Specify the size of the longest side. I use 1000 pixels, which is the size you see when you click on a Pattaya Days image. If you are producing an image for Facebook, use 720 pixels. Click OK.

That’s the processing done. Final steps are to save the file as a JPEG. Go to File/Save As and save your masterpiece as a JPEG:

Done!! If you have been following along and creating an Action, now is the time to stop it.

Your Action should look almost like this:

What it won’t have is that little box next to Smart Sharpen. Click on the space to add that box. Now run your action against another image. A dialog box will pop up to allow you to specify the sharpening settings. When you close that box, the Action will finish and you file will be created. Easy! You can also put a flag against the second “Image Size” step if you want to pick different sizes from time to time. Save your Action. Now you can use it anytime without having to step through the process.

Here is the result of the tweak on my test image:

And this was the image before the tweak:

View full size by clicking on them; the improvement is subtle but the processed image has more pop and clarity.

Here’s another one. Shot at base ISO with the GF1, there was only a tiny bit of noise to remove and the image was OK without the tweak. But even so, the tweak gave it a little something extra (click to view full size):

Original:

Tweak:

If I am putting photos on the web, most will go through the tweak process first. I think it is worth the minimal effort. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Some additional thoughts:

• You will note that my Action is called Facebook Portrait. This is because, when I defined this Action, I specified height parameters on the two image re-size steps,as we did in the example. You will have to go through the process again and build another Action where you specify the width, this can then be used for landscape orientation images. If your image is square, you can use either!

• This works with shots taken in RAW. If you shoot JPEG; change to RAW, your life will be better in many ways. If your camera doesn’t shoot RAW, buy another camera (and make sure it doesn’t have a flappy mirror).

• Why not just dial in more sharpening in Lightroom? Because this approach gives a much better result for very little additional effort (once you have set it up). It has The Son seal of approval, what more do you need to know?

• Why is this particularly good for Micro Four Thirds cameras? Because many of them have a little noise in the image, even at base ISO. Get rid of that noise, run this routine, and all your photos will look better. Mine do.

• Generating PSD files and subsequent JPEGs will take up space and will be hard to manage? Not if you delete them once you are done. Note that my saves go into a temporary data file. Once the JPEG has been uploaded to the web, the PSD and resulting JPEG are trashed. I can always generate another one if I need it.

• Why don’t I just save you the effort and provide you with these Actions? If you can’t be arsed to work through the above yourself, leave a comment below “Dear Spike, I am a lazy git, please send me the Actions.” Make sure the email address is valid because that is where I will sent them.

Comments 🔗

2012-01-25 | Pattaya Ghost says

Does this mean we can start referring to you as a Tweaker?

Seriously, though, 2 questions:

1. Do you not use/recommend the “Save to Web” box which aimed at optimizing images by size, color space, etc. vs. just the stock File > Save As?

2. Not sure I understand the advantage of the intermediate resize? Why not just take the original PSD output by Lightroom and sharpen that, then resize to final output size? Each time you resize, you lose some of the image quality.

2012-01-25 | TheSon says

2. Originally I instigated the fixed-length resize so that whatever the source image dimensions were, the Smart Sharpen kernel could be the same approximate size when the action was running. It also is easier to loupe the sharpening result in the preview window when it’s not running on a 4000px wide image. And it runs a bit faster :)

.. in reality, the result will look very very similar if you do or don’t go via an intermediate resize (I’ve tried both, and other configs too). The real magic here is doing SS in the L channel, and picking a correct SS kernel size that doesn’t sharpen any residual noise and doesn’t make large-scale details look odd.

2012-01-25 | Spike says

1. The only extras I can see in the save to web option are the ability to take out exif, and the option to save at less than 100% quality; which would not make much sense after all that work.

2. What The Son said. Plus, if you are going to make an Action, then you might as well make it complex so you can brag about it in the pub. “Multi-step process”…." preserve pixel integrity"…. “stepped approach to image size reduction”…. People will buy you a drink just to get rid of you. Works for me anyway.

2012-01-25 | Jamie says

Well, damn… if the son ever hits Phuket, I owe him a drink.

2012-01-25 | Bob says

Great tip. Ignore that Ghost character, he’s all hot air :)

Now that I have CS5 updated I’ll have to give it a try.

FYI – and totally off topic – all the reviews and comments I’ve read about the Oly MFTs say they are super with JPEG but just so-so with RAW. After 3 different sessions shooting dual-format JPG/RAW I think the RAW output is pretty great. I don’t mind taking time to process RAW so I’m thinking I’ll just forsake the JPG unless I’m in a hurry.

2012-01-25 | Spike says

I think the consensus is that Olympus JPEGs are some of the most pleasing in the industry. The RAW output should be pretty much the same as a Panasonic sensor. You may need up to 20 noise reduction at base ISO to clean them up; then apply the tweak for maximum magnificence.

2012-01-27 | Spanky says

Going to try give this a try this weekend. If my photos turnout abysmal I will blame you. If they turn out great I will of course take all the credit. :)

2012-05-13 | Oddie says

Thanks for the examples, i’m alawys so worried i sharpen my images to much then i under sharpen them i generally use CS4 unsharp mask and play around a bit starting to think i spend to much time over thinking my photos..

2012-08-11 | Night Swimming « Induced Chaos Photography says

[…] Speaking of retouching, of course I have the RAW file which is what this final product was produced from.  The RAW is stored in color so there was some tweaking going on.  The noise from this shot was horrible so I had to clean that up.  Even converting it to black and white wasn’t going to hide all of it.  I didn’t want a grainy look so I removed that and I did a detail enhance on the columns reflection in the water (sneaky aren’t I).  I had to remove a bit more noise in Lightroom and then off to Photoshop for some sharpening and resizing (thanks Spike). […]

2015-01-13 | Resolution Is My Name | Induced Chaos Photography says

[…] one image got the hue and saturation tool. The rest are as shot. I am also using a variation of Uncle Spike’s “tweak” to remove any excess noise and add that final bit of […]