What is your sharpening secret sauce?

I frequently find myself applying a 0.47-0.49 sharpening in secondary, whether it's in a power window to draw attention to one area of an image, or over the whole image (apart from faces / people which I find to be better handled via MD). This is excluding NR, resizing, or legitimate in-camera focus issues where a case by case and/or plugin approach is necessary.

I find that 0.47-0.49 generally makes everything cleaner and seems to have no deleterious effects creating artifacts or splotches or even being noticeable without an A/B test.

I realize some of this is stylistic due to story and cinematography, but I would be interested to know what some of the gurus here find themselves doing re: sharpening on a routine basis. Thoughts?

I focus in-camera, never use it in post.

(My projects are simple.)

What camera are you using?

I know that in-camera sharpening algorithms vary widely, perhaps this is why I'm winding up where I am. A lot of the footage I'm working on is Red Scarlet at 4K, so it's a 5k sensor cropped to 4k then downsized to 2k for color.

In sound mixing, often rather than adding a peak to a specific frequency, they drop the others in order to bring out that particular sound.

I think you can use a similar trick with defocus: don't sharpen what's inside the window... soften what's outside the window.

I think there's a big danger in potential enhancement artifacts, particularly noise and an ugly kind of harshness. If I'm forced to use sharpening by a client, I'll try +Midtone Detail, or maybe tweak the Soften/Sharpen control to just include the specific details we're looking at. And I'll use a tracking window to confine the effect to just that specific area, roto'd if necessary.

In sound mixing, often rather than adding a peak to a specific frequency, they drop the others in order to bring out that particular sound.

I think you can use a similar trick with defocus: don't sharpen what's inside the window... soften what's outside the window.

This is excellent advice, thanks Marc.

Seeing that the responses here were anti-sharpening I did some research on my situation. Yes, it *does* have to do with the camera sensor. Apparently Scarlet 4k footage, which is actually the 5k Epic MX sensor cropped down to 4k, tends to need sharpening. There's a whole thread discussing it here:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/archive/in ... 72594.html
>RED does ZERO sharpening in camera and instead leave "sharpening to taste".

I believe I have nuked these camera raw sharpening settings because I'm grading with the IPP2 workflow, and the Scarlet was not designed for that originally! This explains why razor-sharp focus shots are still benefiting from *very* light sharpening across the image.

(sharing this should anyone find themselves in a similar situation)

Red tends to use a conservative approach to OLPF strength, just like Arri.
And if you only have 4K CMOS photocells for 4K pixels, some sharpening will make sense.
Of course, what Marc wrote is very sane advice.

Red tends to use a conservative approach to OLPF strength, just like Arri.
And if you only have 4K CMOS photocells for 4K pixels, some sharpening will make sense.
Of course, what Marc wrote is very sane advice.

A great day—I'm learning new things and my instincts have been validated. Thanks.

What camera are you using?

I know that in-camera sharpening algorithms vary widely

Currently, Pocket 4K.

But I don't use "in-camera sharpening". I disable that.

I just...focus. Comes out plenty sharp. (For my modest projects.)

I'd never use in-camera sharpening. It's never as good as what you can achieve in post. Plus, it makes compression worse.