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Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2 Review by D. Weaver
Most Effective Sharpening I've ever used!
I bought this book about 6 months ago and it has become a "bible" of sharpening for me. I shot with 6mp and 8mp (now 10mp) dSLRS and had previously used a single pass of UnSharp Mask or Smart Sharpen for sharpening. (all digital photos need sharpening -- *all* of them -- and in-camera sharpening is not desirable for many reasons)
My photos never came out as sharp as others I had seen published and I kept asking myself, "what am I doing wrong?! Is it my equipment, my photo technique, ...?". Now I know that at least part of it was my *sharpening* technique. Also, I needed to learn that photos properly sharpened for output (printing) will likely *not* look good on the screen (esp at 100%), and how to better judge output sharpness when viewing on the screen. Hints: (1) don't get freaked by apparent sharpening ugliness when viewing at 100% or greater; (2) only view at even zoom factors like 25% and 50%; and (3) 50% is often a fair zoom to use when judging sharpening for output.
The results I've seen from the sharpening techniques in this book range from "great" to "oh-my-god-this-is-*fabulous*". I'm finally producing photos that are as sharp as I had always hoped for, comparable to anything I've seen published.
Bruce Fraser starts at the beginning, explaining the need for sharpening, and proceeds to build a case for why a three-level sharpening process is so effective (Source Sharpening, Content/Creative Sharpening, and Output Sharpening). After you're convinced by his sound reasoning that this is a good idea, he details *how* to implement this 3-pass sharpening process. I codified the three passes into Photoshop Actions, which now take no more time for me to run than the single-pass sharpening I had previously done.
I keep this book in my car or on my shelf, with dozens of post-it tags sticking out where I added my own indexing to all the good parts. I'm sure that this book will become ragged with use, over the years. It is without a doubt the most useful photography book I've bought in the last 10 years.