DT Tuesday Tech Tip: Fine Tuning

Welcome to our online version of DT Tuesday Tech Tips! Here we will post a monthly Capture One tip to help you get the most out of Capture One 8. Are you a DT hardware client and would like to receive our weekly DT Tuesday Tech Tip? Contact us.

DT Tech Tip #306 : Fine Tuning

Today’s tech tip covers an in-depth look at the Sharpening tool, specifically Threshold. Continue reading to learn more on how to produce the best results.

Sharpening & Threshold

Sharpening is available under the Details Tool Tab.

The default Sharpening Threshold setting in Capture One is 1.0. This means that a feature/detail of the subject must be at least one level apart (e.g. 200 and 201) before it will receive sharpening.

Traditionally a sharpening threshold is used to avoid sharpening noise. However, Phase One backs, at a low ISO and with a short exposure, produce nearly zero noise.
By lowering the sharpening threshold from 1.0 to 0.0 (or some value in between) you will notice a more homogenous increase in the visual prominence of subject detail. For instance paper texture will be increased just as much as actual content. This is more true to the tenets of cultural heritage imaging since it is applied equally to all types of subject matter. It is also prettier. The same can be said for product imagery.

Similarly a traditional sharpening radius default is over 1 pixel (meaning a circumference of 2 pixels) because most lens+aperture+demosaicing combinations cannot reliably produce very fine details. However in Capture One v8 a very sophisticated industry leading algorithm is used, and in combination with the best possible glass and prime apertures like f/8 means our detail is very good at the pixel level. Therefore lowering the sharpening radius to less than one pixel (e.g. 0.8) can help extract all the detail we’ve captured.

A reminder about the “disable sharpening” processing option might be useful at the end since many places don’t want to sharpen at all on at least some of their processing.
Summary
Please let us know if you have any questions on Sharpening. Contact us by phone, emailor our new Web Help Desk.

Most current version for Mac and Windows: 8.2
Mac OS X 10.9.x/10.10.x running on an Intel machine required.