How do YOU sharpen your Camera Scans? Emulsion differences in: positive, negative? I know there are personal preferences but just looking for a good baseline. I have lots of B&W negative and color positive.
Adobe Camera Raw / Photoshop: Amount, Detail, Radius, Masking settings
My baseline is:
Copy stand, Canon R5, Sigma 70mm ART, cross colimated sheets on a CSLITE, tethered
Presence
Texture +15-20
Clarity 0
Dehaze 0
Sharpening
Amount 75
Radius 1.2
Detail 50
Masking 15-30 (to not sharpen grain in pure blacks but perhaps this is the wrong approach)
Sharpening
Amount 85
Radius 0.9
Detail 50
Masking 15-25 (to not adjust for the blacks on the rebate or slidemount)
Noise (on slide film)
Luminance- 0
Color Noise - 35-60 depending on the type of chrome - High ISO has a more obvious color cloud of dyes (rather than explicit grain) that the bayer sensor seems to struggle to smoothly interpret where a traditional scanner or drum would not. Easily corrected now.
Detail - 25
Everything coming out even better than before. Too much masking previously unevenly sharpened the grain/dye cloud that could sometimes be visible. Now I am adjust just for pure white and black very gently.
This approach seems uncommon, but my preference is that I set sharpening and noise reduction always off in lightroom for my raw scans.
I scan pretty much only 120 & 35mm color negs with Nikon Z5 + Micro Nikkor 105mm/2.8 AI-s.
I don’t prefer the way lightroom sharpens the grain, at least on my setup, go figure. I do use output sharpening at export though, that seems fine to me. Not exactly sure there’s a difference between raw sharpening and output sharpening. My assumption has been that output sharpening is some basic unsharp mask type thing and raw sharpening is something else that I just don’t like, not at all sure though.
On the other side, I find that noise reduction takes away the qualities of the film grain that appeal to me, so that’s why that’s off too.
For social media I sometimes use some
sharpening, like in instagrams edit view before posting. For prints I do sweat over sharpening in photoshop a lot, but I rarely ever print so that’s a lot of guess work.
I do use output sharpening at export though, that seems fine to me. Not exactly sure there’s a difference between raw sharpening and output sharpening. My assumption has been that output sharpening is some basic unsharp mask type thing and raw sharpening is something else that I just don’t like, not at all sure though.