Using USM

[Gill]

Just read Bud's reply on another forum , giving his favourite USM settings. Thanks Bud. Does anyone else have a USM setting they regularly try?

[jerrymeola]

this has a feel of cleaning up the image without a great deal of sharpening.

it avoids the problems of too much USM

Never go higher than 30 although you can apply two or three times if you really need more. I find I go down to 10-20% for many images.

[Gill]

Thanks Jerry. I tried it on a couple of photos and liked what it did to them. You're right, it didn't look too over sharpened. I find it's easy to get the over sharpened look, especially when viewing on a monitor.
Anyone else got a different, favourite USM setting for particular types of photos?

[autumnsky]

Originally posted by Gill
Just read Bud's reply on another forum , giving his favourite USM settings. Thanks Bud. Does anyone else have a USM setting they regularly try?

Gill, USM settings depends on the type of image that you're trying to sharpen. I don't think you can come up with a favorite setting that you can use on all types of images. Here are a couple of articles that I think will help to clarify:

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/11242.html
http://www.bythom.com/sharpening.htm

[Gill]

Thanks Autumnsky. Both those links look really good. I've printed them out, as I usually need to read this kind of information at least 5 times before it sinks in! I am trying to learn how to start using photoshop - but it's a slow process.

[ImKayd1]

oops

[ChronosIII]

Try this... Look at each channel of a RGB or CMYK image seperately sometimes one channel (usually green) is the only channel to need USM to sharpen the Image. And applying USM to just the one channel can really help to avoid many of the side effects of Over or Under sharpening.

Although it really depends on the image I usually try 150,1.0,0 and apply it twice and see how that looks.

[jimshoos]

Have you tried 3rd party sharpening plug-ins like FocalBlade or CrispImage . I think they provide better results than USM.