Sharpen Settings

I have written about this before but would like more help.


The Fuji lab will make A4 prints for me.

I want to know what settings to use to sharpen my pictures as with
sharpening we really seem to be unable to rely upon what we see on the
monitor. i am going to be sending a big print order so i want to get
it right or not do sharpening at all.

(I use a Canon 10D which i love. Half my picture were shot raw half on
large fine. I read that the camera processing is great in non raw
shots so i would feel ok leaving them as they arebt if i can get them
to look better...

AFAIK there is no built in sharpening on a 10d that i would need to
have had switched off before sharpening manually.

I want to use nik sharpener pro, though i could try photoshop too.




I will stick the prints on a wall for people to see at reading
distance.

I would like to know what settings to use:

PRINTER QUALITY
what should i use as this value? It is a fuji print shop, remember.
The dpi...? Is it laser or ink jet or...?


IMAGE HEIGHT / WIDTH
No problems with that

IMAGE SOURCE
OK, it has a setting for top end digital cameras, and the 10D is top
end, right?!
But it also says for cameras with more than 4.2 million pixels use
the appropriate middle or large format transparency setting. The
options there are:

APS film
Small Format Slide (35mm or similar slides, positive or negative)
Medium Format Slides (medium format positive or negative)
Large Transparency (Large transparency of any format)

Which should I select?
These won't be effected by whether I shoot RAW or Large Fine, will
they?
(Large fine = .TIFF Large ordinary =jpeg, right?)

IMAGE QUALITY
Do I leave this as default in the centre or move it up to good?

PRINTER QUALITY
It is a laser, right? and a good quality one, I think... so I move
this up to the right and set is as good...

EYE DISTANCE
Well, they might come close to peer at it so I guess I should set this
as Book, as if they were holiding it in their hands.

PERSONAL PROFILE
I have yet to see some well made prints with this yet but i guess ZAP
would be the most impressive sharpening...?

 

I have written about this before but would like more help.

Nik Sharpener Pro isn't necessary and I think a waste of money. What I would do
if I were you is to set your images to your A4 size and whatever the ppi is for
that size I would divide that by 375 for your radius setting and use an amount
of 175%. I never use the threshold setting as too much doesn't look natural and
too little doesn't make any practical difference. These are the settings I
normally use for images I get from my film scanner and my images match optical
images I used to get straight from the negative. An alternative for a noisier
picture would be to divide the ppi by 325 and lower the amount to 150. That
would give a slightly greater radius and slightly less grittiness. To be honest
though the difference is not readily apparent from the previous settings I
mentioned unless you are picky. Your 10D files should be nice and creamy clean
so I would stick with the first settings above. How did I arrive at these
values? By running alot of test prints. This formula works for any size print.
Not sure how well it would work for pictures greatly upsampled in size as I
never do that.

If I am not mistaken, by default, your Canon does sharpen so I would experiment
by running a test A4 with a sampled section repeated throughout the print with
different values around the ones I gave you. Mark them to know the values of
each section.

The most important setting is knowing how much of a radius to apply for a
particular print size. Once you find one that works for that size print
remember it so you can apply the same proportional amount to any size print
like I explained above.

Laser. I believe the Fuji machine expects files set at 300ppi so you can size
it to A4 at 300ppi. If I were you I would skip that step and work with the
original file size and simply set your A4 size without doing any resampling. It
is said that the machines cannot do anything more than the 300 ppi it is
designed for but I get prints done on a Noritsu that expects files at 320ppi
and I regularly give it files much higher than that and I see slightly
noticeable improvement in detail and smoothness.

I don't like sharpening programs like Nik Sharpener Pro because you never know
exactly what it is doing and I also don't believe in selective sharpening for
different areas of the picture for most pictures. I also don't believe in
spending so much money on something you can do yourself with excellent results.