Sharpness concerns

[Floris Liesker]

It looks to me as if both team #19 and team #22 had the same issue with their early footage, it contained a lot of 'sharpening'.
Team #19: http://www.appliedvisual.com/tonaci/hero.tiff
Team #22: http://www.fxguide.com/modules/NewsU...m_tk1Still.jpg

Could it be that Red Alert! has a sharpening default setting of 100%? In the user interface I couldn't really see a sharpening slider, maybe the teams didn't see it either and thought it would be at default 0?

Trying to be Sherlock Holmes here... Graeme, can you help me out?

[Brook Willard]

Sharpening is in a menu... we didn't look at first. I expect that they did the same.

Don't fret. The reason the sharpening looks like ass is because there is sharpening in the first place. When it's turned off, the problems go away [at least on our footage].

Graeme has stated that sharpening will be off by default in the next version of Red Alert!.

[Floris Liesker]

Great!
No sharpening would also be much more in line with what Red footage should look like, in my opinion: Organic.

[Graeme Nattress]

There's two things:

1) without some sharpening, images can look a tad soft and people complain about that.

2) with sharpening images can have sharpening artifacts that some people complain about.

3) I'm working on, but have not completed some "nicer" sharpening algorithms that should balance between the needs of 1) and 2) above better, but I've not got it working yet.

4) Next build of RedAlert! defaults to sharpen=off and offers 3 levels if you turn it on.

Graeme

[Floris Liesker]

Coincidentally, I recently tried the same. When I received some out-of-focus footage I made a composit in which I tried to create a 'nicer' sharpening, avoiding halo's.
Would this be your approach as well?

This was the original image:


With normal sharpening it looked like this:


I wanted to rule out the digital halo's around the white beerglasses but I wanted to keep the detail in the bricks, and made a combination of filters to do so.
In the end it looked like this:

[Graeme Nattress]

I'm looking at a non-haloing or at least, non ringing halo based approach....

Graeme

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Would it be possible to apply sharpening only on low contrast regions?

For instance on the FXGuide footage, which has had the life sharpened out of it most of the "problem" areas are in extremely high contrast areas--areas that don't really need sharpening as it is. On the other hand a little sharpening in something like... dirt would be almost completely unnoticeable but would significantly boost the effect.

One thing you have to be careful with sharpening is that you apply it *last*. That's a large part of the reason why the sharpening was as painful as it was in some of those shots. I'm betting what happened was they applied sharpening to a pretty flat image and then when grading the image in photoshop the sharpening got its contrast enhanced even further.

[Poi Boy]

right Gavin, always sharpen last and in accordance to specific target ouput. With stills I really like sharpening only specific areas of an image; I'm going to try that same technique with my red footage. Can't wait !
Aloha
-A

[Emanuel A.]

Good tips, actually.

I share the same concerns.

Can I sincerely add a honest but only my humble opinion?

The milkgirls footage is a lot more pleasant footage than this latter one. As matter of fact, I've been thinking to add a Silicon Imaging camera to my investment since last friday. I feel it more cinematic.

I'd like to have options in-camera on any of both directions. Mixing up if necessary. Wouldn't 4K have resolution enough to handle any damages to the effective sharpness of our Mysterium sensor?

[Graeme Nattress]

Currently, in camera is no sharpening. In RAW, it's your choice, and I'm working on improved options too. Once that's done, that'll be enough to keep everyone happy.

Graeme