Sharpening, resize and colour management

[scottmc]

Hi,

I'm a novice to all this and was wondering if I could get some advice? I've just bought a Konica revio 310, It's a 3.2 mp camera and was wondering

1) I know it's subjective but on unsharp what sort of figures should I be using?

2)When sending my pics to be printed should I use the resize for print option or leave that to the lab?

3) Colour management. Once I've used adobe gamma to calibrate my monitor should I use adobe rgb 1998 as the working space in RGB or should I use what my print lab uses? As far as I can see I shouldn't use monitor profile and when I try to load the monitors calibrated profile it seems to go back to adobe rgb 1998. Would it be simply good enough to stick to adobe rgb 1998 with my monitor calibrated correctly?

Thanks for any advice.

[Stephen M]

Hi Scott, welcome to RP.

To start, I will keep things brief and simple - before we get deeper into things. <g> Chances are that I will scare you away with this 'simple' explanation. <bg>

i) Sharpening - there is no answer to this question. It will depend on too many variables and camera and Photoshop may have different results.

There are automated plugs which use 'AI' to determine what sharpness to use based on some questions about the input/output - but this is far from as good as a human who knows what to do (it is not that hard). But as a start you can even use the demo product to sharpen then to try to match the same result using your other tools, before deciding what works best. Search for NikSharpenerPro from NikMultimedia, but I am not a real fan of this, but many are.

More info on sharpening can be found here:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/PSTV_links.html#S

ii) Image Size - This can affect output quality, so it is best to find what pixel dimensions are required for output (3000x2000 pixels for example). This way you can resize the image yourself and then sharpen with the appropriate amount for the resize and the output conditions. Sharpening is directly related to the output method, viewing distance and other variables.


iii) Colour - There should be some way to describe the colour that comes off your camera. Some cameras can be set to shoot into a known space like sRGB or Adobe RGB or they have a ICC profile or other description of the colour in the camera.

The image is opened into Photoshop and the ICC profile that describes the camera colour is honoured if there is an accurate profile tagged to the image, or one manually assigns the correct colour profile to the image.

The image is then converted to the safe working space that one has decided to use in Photoshop to edit images, such as Adobe RGB (it is usually not a good idea to edit directly in camera RGB which is why it is assigned and then converted, hope this makes sense).

Finally the image is converted from the working RGB to the final output colour profile at print time, as one example.

The monitor profile created with Adobe Gamma or with more accurate software/hardware describes the monitor to Photoshop and is not used for editing the image inside Photoshop, it is only used for more accurate display of the image.

Some VERY good colour management primers can be found here:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/PSTV_links.html#I

Hope this helps,

Stephen Marsh.

[scottmc]

Thanks very much..plenty of reading on the links!!

Just a matter of suck it and see I guess!!

[Jakaleena]

Thanks for helping out with that, Stephen!

I looked at it and just went "Yikes! That third question is way over my head" I'm profile challenged you know....

Wasn't sure how to respond at all to #3 - great answers!