Photoshop: Unsharp Mask settings

[Mr Downtown]

What are good default settings for Unsharp Mask?

I do mostly architectural/real estate photography. I like to apply it two or three times rather than oversharpen in one big chunk. But I've never understood the various parameters.

[jdc]

more small unsharps is how i have always been told to do it as well

i use 25/2/1 as many times as needed

[Gutenberg]

I work on newsprint. I use 124/1.4/16 for black and white and 200/1.9/9 for color. You can always undo and back off if it is too much.

[DaviDC.]

I never use Unsharp Mask any more.

Make a new layer of your photo & go to Filters > Other > High Pass & set it to 3 or 4.
Apply the filer to the new layer then set it to Overlay. Flatten the image & you're done.

[Don Kiyoti]

I usually start with 100/0.4/0 and go from there. I use smart sharpen instead sometimes. Lately I do most of my sharpening in Lightroom anyway. Here's a good article that takes some of the mystery out of USM:

http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/techniques/usm/

[pixelzombie]

it depends on your output, for offset printing from a decent camera i would start @ 150%-1-1..in general you want the image on your display to appear oversharpened as it will soften when printed...

[Ombligo]

One issue with unsharp mask is that after applying it, if you need to significantly downsize an image for any reason, you'll often get jagged edges from artifacting.

here is a simple trick in photoshop that works for ISO 800 and down (gets noisy at higher settings).

Save your image as a photoshop document but leave it open. Go to Filters - texture. select texturizer. In that filter, set it to 100% and level 12 then load the saved photoshop image and apply it.

You will often see a decent sharpening effect and not get any issues if you downsize.

[wowzer]

I typically use something like:

amount: 200-300

radius: 0.3

threshold: 0



Another way to sharpen that works really well with the D300 images is to use NeatImage and have it do sharpening on the yellow channel as it removes noise.

[AllGold]

The first number, the Amount, is simply "how much" sharpening. Should be pretty straightforward.

The Radius roughly means "how big" or put another way, how big a bite to take at a time (literally it's the number of pixels in a radius used by the filter to do its edge enhancement). The radius needs to be adjusted based on the size of the image. The larger the image, the larger the radius should be and vice-versa. For an 800 pixel image, you would probably want a radius of about 0.3 to 0.8 (adjust for personal preference and image content). For a 3000 pixel image, you might want something around 1.5, etc. If your radius is too large for the size of your image, you will start to see outlines around all the edge details.

Finally, the Threshold roughly means how big does the detail need to be to not be overlooked. The bigger the number, the bigger the feature must be to be sharpened--or everything below the threshold is not sharpened. You generally use the threshold to keep from sharpening noise.