Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson to Resizing photos and Sharpening them. This would be considered a final step in post processing as you're ready to export and save an image as a JPEG for release on the Internet or in a computer application where you want a smaller size. Let's look at this image, which is a P51C Mustang. I took the photo at a local airshow, processed it into HDR from one Raw and I'm looking at 100 percent magnification here and obviously this is pretty big. Ten megapixel camera with no cropping, or very little cropping Ð I forget if I might have cropped some parts out Ð the point is here, the image is ready for its final stages of the journey. Everything is completed from the bracketing of the photos to the creating HDR to Tone Mapping in Photomatix. I've post processed in Photoshop and now I'm ready to send it on its way. To do that select Image, Image Size and that opens up the Image Size dialog box and you've got a lot of different options here. Pixel Dimensions you can change, you can base your Document Size, Resolution, you can also Resample the image, which if you don't Resample the image you can change your Resolution here without Resampling the image. I tend to do that a lot of times. To change your Pixel Dimensions, just simply enter the Width or the Height, and if you have the, ah, to Length, you'll maintain the same Aspect Ratio. You can change from Pixels to Percent, and so forth. If you don't to Constrain Proportions check that and that removes your link so that you can Resize each dimension independently. Now, Resampling, got a couple different options here. Nearest Neighbor, which preserves hard edges, by Linear, here we have three different versions of Bicubic. Plain old Bicubic, Smoother, which it says is best for enlargements, and then Sharper, which is best for reduction. I'm going to pick Bicubic first and then resharpen later. I'm pressing that, we're Resampled. Now, come to Filter, Sharpen, now the best method that I've found to sharpen the reduction is actually Smart Sharpen. Opens up the Smart Sharpen dialog box, you can drag around in the Preview window. It's kind of like noise reduction. You've got Basic and Advanced settings; Advanced you can Sharpen, got Shadow Highlight settings, Basic, you've just got your Amount, Radius, and then Removing certain Blurs. More Accurate gives oomph in terms of processing. Now, if I drag this around you can see the effects show up as the Preview. Sometimes the Preview doesn't work while I'm shooting videos here. So if I drag it you can see it's back to blurry and then sharpen. The biggest danger of sharpening is over sharpening and creating artifacts within the photo and here you can see them showing up in the smooth chrome on the airplane. You're not going to see them so much in rough textures like the trees, but you will in clouds, you will on smoother surfaces. So the point is to ratchet back the Amount, play with the Radius if you like. Here we're looking at a much more artistic effect. Smaller Radius for a more natural appearance. Moving Lens Blur if you've got some in there, Motion Blur, or Gaussian Blur if you like, and press OK when you're done. Now this is not, obviously the highest quality this is ever going to be. If I go ahead and save this for Web Devices I can zoom out, I can choose my format, JPEG let's say, 60 quality converting to sRGB. I can Resize here again as well. I probably don't need to since I've already done that. I'll press Save, put it on the Desktop and there we go. So, it's the final stage of the journey. You're losing quality, of course, because you're reducing the image size down, which means you're losing data at the same time then, that tends to blur an image, so we need to recapture some detail by Sharpening. The best way to do that is to Smart Sharpen and at the end you're ready to save that as a JPEG, which again, technically loses quality because JPEG is a lousy compression scheme. I'm taking a look at another one, we got back to the bogey wheel, here we've got much larger image, 3880 by 2608. We can reduce that down Smooth Gradient by Cubic, press OK. Filter, Sharpen, Smart Sharpen, and here we can see maybe a little more artistic reason to over sharpen this. I kind of like this over sharpening effect on the bogey wheel, so I'm going to leave that as it is and zoom in here and see what it looks like. Perhaps a little more graphic arts nature. So the point here is when you're doing things artistically sometimes even bad settings can look good. You're not enslaved to a particular approach or a particular methodology. Now, I've resized, I've sharpened, I'm ready to save that for the Web and Devices. Same routine. Select Format, select your Quality if you like, Higher Quality, Lower Quality, Converting Color space here; I'm not going to Resize again, but I can see my ultimate file size and down here my download time. Pressing Save I'm going to save that to my Desktop. That looks good. Now I can close this in Photoshop, not save that, come out and see the final JPEG here in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. You can see it's definitely sharpened beyond what you might expect in a traditional photograph but I kind of like that effect.