Exercise 24 Sharpening for print

This exercise asked me to take an image that I had processed as a reference standard and make 3 versions each with a different degree of sharpening.

So, here's my start portrait.  I took this on a dull, day with very flat light and if you look very close, you can see just that his eyes, which should always be the main point of focus, are just outside the front point of the depth of field for sharpness.

I thought I would sharpen just the head area so here I've used the Quick Mask to carefully select the boy's head and neck area.

I tried an increase to 50% sharpness to see if that would improve the overall sharpness of his face.

 This had the effect of sharpening slightly but with no greater impact of pixels.  I don't think it's quite enough. so I tried sharpening the image by 100%:

You can just start to see the pixilation of the face area in this shot, it's only slight and could just be an acceptable 'fix'.  I thought that I would take it further and changed the slider to 200% and with this sharpening you could definitely see the pixels which are becoming very unacceptable.

Just for experimentation, I took the slider up to 500% which was completely unacceptable as the whole face area was completely pixilated.  Nobody would find this in any way natural which is what the majority of pictures try to portray.

Through a process of elimination I found that the most acceptable level of sharpness was in the region of 85%.  This gave an element of sharpness but kept pixilation to a minimum.

85% Sharpened

Finished, acceptably sharpened image