Is the sharpness of a digital photo best judged close-up, or, at a “natural portrait-viewing distance”?
Some manipulations that increase the contrast of a photo can appear to not affect the sharpness, at a natural viewing distance (i.e., perhaps ~ 12 in. from your eyes). However, a considerable increase in square “blocks” that resemble JPEG artifacts that greatly reduce the close-up sharpness are introduced, but yet they are visible ONLY when the photo is viewed up-close, at several hundred percent digitally magnified.
The Nik Sharpener plugin for Photoshop may or may not define a universally applicable “natural viewing distance” for casual everyday macroscopic photography that does not involve using the photos for such things as recording critical evidence or any type of analog or digital data capture.
It’s normal to view sharpness on a computer on image files when they are viewed at 100%, i.e. actual pixels. The size it appears on the screen is determined by how many pixels there are in the file. How big you can print without adding pixels to pad the file out (interpolation) depends on this number too as does the amount of sharpening you can (and need to) apply.
You can avoid the ‘blocks’ up to a point by allowing the software to interpolate the image file to add more pixels. These are ‘invented’ pixels derived from the data. This always works better when you start with a large file, it’s not very effective with the small files such as those downloaded from the web.
It’s possible for an out of focus image to look sharp if the edges in the picture are high contrast. This applies to colour contrast as well a Luminance contrast.
If your talking about viewing a print then you may be viewing the individual pixels laid down by the printer particularly if the print is small, the smaller the print the higher the printer resolution (DPI) needs to be.
If you get the sharpening right then viewing distance doesn’t enter into it for all practical purposes.
Chris
Digital Photography Tips : Definition of Stock Photography
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