Dino Saga 080831 _ Sharpening CRT and LCD | FerrariChat

Dino Saga 080831 _ Sharpening CRT and LCD

Discussion in 'Corbani's Corner' started by John Corbani, Aug 31, 2008.

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  1. John Corbani

    John Corbani Formula 3
    Honorary Owner

    May 5, 2005
    1,153
    Santa Barbara, CA
    Full Name:
    John Corbani
    #1 John Corbani, Aug 31, 2008
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 7, 2017
    Dino Saga 080831 _ Sharpening CRT and LCD

    I have been a Sharpen advocate for anyone who shrinks and then posts pictures on FChat. A few folks have said that I sharpen too much. My pictures look great on my monitor so I started to do a little digging. My wife has a fairly new Compaq laptop with Vista and an Intel graphics media accelerator 950. I have never used an LCD display for graphics because of the color and contrast.variations with viewing angle. The other downside is the size of the pixels. 17” CRTs of recent manufacture can display at least 1280 pixels across easily. The pixel is a circle made up of very many small dots of red, green and blue phosphers. Lots of dots per pixel. Color does not change with angle.

    The Compaq LCD display is a fixed 1280 pixels wide. Each pixel is a square containing a stripe for red, green, blue and black. The Intel software does a good job making these large stripes handle fine detail. They sharpen everything and this is probably why my pictures look too sharp to some folks. I use a 17” CRT monitor for all my editing. It is set up to display 1024 pixels across. Fine for most things including FChat. Pictures are displayed at full resolution, 800 x 600, with no artifacts and plenty of room for all the Browser overhead top and bottom.

    I got my camera out and exercised the macro settings. I posted some pictures for Fred last week and his red Dino looked like a reasonable subject for a comparison. I brought both computers up and sent the original pic from my computer to the laptop. Displayed the pic on both computers. 9.75” wide on the CRT, 8.2” wide on the LCD. Pic was fuzzy on CRT, much better on LCD. Picked left front wheel as a good spot to check sharpness and took some macro pics.

    The laptop dropped the very fine detail and increased the contrast between pixels it decided to display. The CRT had very smooth transitions from light to dark and looked fuzzy. I added sharpness until both looked as good as they could. Medium Sharp (my standard) looked fine on the CRT but was too much on the LCD. Lite Sharp was enough for the LCD. Just for the fun of it I did a heavy Sharp shot. The grass gets frosted and all edges get a white and black outline. Hard to get both the pixels and the image at the same time. But not quite impossible.

    Enjoy the pictures. Please Sharpen your pictures after reduction and before posting. I did find out that Picasa 2 does a pretty good job of reduction but is a pain to use. I still find PhotoStudio by ArcSoft to be a very complete Darkroom that works like a manual darkroom of old. That is all you really need. Edited pictures are nicer to look at for all of us and makes a huge difference in the impact of shots on the uninitiated. I will make sure to cut my sharpening back a little now that LCDs have taken over the world. Isn’t technology wonderful?

    John
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  2. Crawler

    Crawler F1 Veteran

    Jul 2, 2006
    5,018
    #2 Crawler, Sep 1, 2008
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 1, 2008
    "Sharpened lightly" looks best on my 19" LCD monitor. On the medium one, the "sawblading" around the window trim and gutters gets pretty noticeable. You're right, though, the fewer the pixels, the tougher it is to render curved edges smoothly. Sharpening exacerbates the problem, for some reason.
     
  3. 2GT

    2GT Formula 3

    Aug 25, 2008
    1,830
    Western NY
    Full Name:
    Fred
    Wonderful job, John. Now I'm a bit sad because, last week, I put the little red Italian away for the season. After I return from vacation, I will drive the blue one on nice weekends. The weather here in late September isn't always that good, but there's nothing like a sunny fall Saturday afternoon for a nice Dino drive in the country! Fred
     

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