Sharpening radius

[croos]

I'm trying to improve myself. First step is to get back to the level, albeit low, I was at 15 years ago when I fell off the photography wagon.

As we all know, basically all tutorials and guides on the net relate to some incarnation of Adobe software, so hard to follow. To be able to follow those guides it would help to understand how some PWP settings relate to the Adobe ones.

ATM I'm specifically trying to improve my sharpening, since I've realized I'm awfully bad at that. I wonder what the numbers in the radius scale(s) in the sharpening transformations stand for. LR et al seem to have a scale from 1 to 3, with decimals. And the numbers stand for pixels. PWP 7's unsharp mask has a scale from 1 to 40, without decimals. Is it tenths of pixels, 1 really mean 0.1 and so on?

Advanced Sharpen's radius scale goes from 0.01 to 16.00. Still pixels? 16 seems a little high for that.

[jsachs]

They are all pixels, although the values may not produce the same results in other programs. Sharpening with a larger radius brings out texture on a larger scale.

[croos]

Thank you. So if I understand you right, it isn't possible to translate LR instructions to PWP, just general directions.

I think one of my main problem with USM is I hadn't understood the importance of the amount slider. And I'm stuck in film. It was so much easier to see when the grain was sharp and that was that. But I'll get there, even if slowly.

[jsachs]

I have not tried to systematically compare LR settings to PWP, so I don't know how closely they correspond. While PWP only allows integer radius values in some of its sharpening and blurring transformations, as you mention you can vary the effect by reducing the Amount a little. Using good noise reduction before sharpening is very important, since sharpening will amplify the noise.

[croos]

Yup, that I remember. Sharpening as last step.