24 April 2009

Does sharpening add up in DPP?

Recently the world famous camera store in New York known as B&H has made available a really interesting video of a seminar presented by Erik Allin from Canon USA. The seminars are all about the Canon software. If you want to find no better use for the best part of two hours it's worth a watch. Even better is that the section with the demonstration of techniques in the Canon Digital Photo Professional software are covered in probably some of the most depth ever seen in the wild. Check out video 2 of 3 and 3 of 3 particularly. Big thanks for that Erik and B&H

However on the topic of sharpening we'd like to dispute the claims made in the video that you can choose to do sharpening in either the RAW or RGB tabs of DPPs tool palette. In our quick test the two sharpening sliders are cumulative. So set +10 sharpening in the RAW tab and then set +500 sharpening in the RGB tab. We found that with both sets of sharpening set to the max then it's more sharpened than when either of them individually is set to the maximum. 

These images are screenshots from DPP edit image window and are in split screen mode at 100% view.

RAW +10 sharpening, RGB 0 sharpening
RAW10
RAW +10 sharpening, RGB +500 sharpening
RAW10-RGB500
RAW 0 sharpening, RGB +500 sharpening
RGB500
To me it seems that the RAW sharpening is applied to the RAW data and then additional sharpening on the RGB data is applied, one small contradiction in an otherwise great presentation.

So to answer the title question, RAW sharpening in DPP does add up.

-blabpictures-

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I must admit I assumed that was the way that all the raw/rgb features stacked -> the Raw tab applies changes at the point of conversion from raw to image, then the RGB tab applies changes at the point of conversion from image to output (TIFF, JPEG,..)

So in theory saturation would also stack?