Originally Posted by
John Rodriguez
Radius sets the width of the sharpening halos. How wide to set them is complete dependent your subject and how many pixels you're playing with. Light halos stand our more then dark ones. I usuallly use separate lighten and darken sharpen layers at different opacities. Also, it's often better to apply locally. I use a range between .5 and 3 pixels, with relatively high amounts and then us opacity to dial in the how strong the halos are, based upon what I learned from Dan Margulis' workflow. Jeff Shewe recommends 1.5 to 3 pixels for edge enhancement. I've tried both low pixel radius's (sub 1) with high opacity and higher radius's (1-3) with lower opacity and the higher radius approach always gives me better prints. Low radius's like .5 I save for web images.
Ramiro, the later method you're describing is often called HIRALOAM sharpening (high radius low amount). It's very useful for enhancing shape contrast where you may not want to increase edge sharpness, such as in faces or moving water.
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