Is sharpening necessary for landscape work?

you can not possibly produce the best images without some post processing, this may, and most likely will, include some sharpening. It is not wise to think that the image captured on the sensor is as good as it gets, or even representative of what you saw. As for how much sharping, it's up to you and your style but it is most often necessary.

You might do yourself a favor and read up on the digital process, and as I like to call it, "the digital system." There are so many parts to capturing an image these days that any one of them can and often will change the out put. At the end of the day, it's all digital and it's all up to you to decide what to do with the data once you capture it. . .

Tony

Without knowing all the parameters in your work flow I can't say. But if you shoot raw on a Nikon body you will want to apply some sharpening to get the best quality. Having said that I think many people way over sharpen. I generally apply very little sharpening to my images. You should certainly never see a sharpening artifact.

What's so magic about the camera? Why can it apply what degree of sharpening it thinks is appropriate (or some Canon engineer thought was appropriate), while if you use your judgement you're "cheating"?

You can set artifical limits on yourself if you like doing things the hard way, but there's no virtue in it. Every great landscape photographer did some post exposure processing, whether it was Ansel Adams in the darkroom while printing or some current photographer in Photoshop.

What Bob wrote.

“Unmanipulated” simply means following a particular old recipe that some people decided a long time ago was the One True Recipe™. Following that recipe is the exact logical equivalence of refusing to shoot in anything other than full-auto program mode: all you’re doing is letting either the camera or the recipe make all the creative decisions.

If you like the results, then great — whatever makes you (and your audience / clientele) happy, go for it. It might even be an effective marketing gimmick.

But don’t delude yourself into thinking that there’s any sort of purity involved or that it’s somehow more representative of reality. In the end, it’s still just a small piece of paper with an arrangement of very small blobs of pigment, about as far as one can get from the original four-dimensional scene as one can get.

Cheers,

b&

If you consider that your work is sufficiently sharp for your purposes without sharpening, then don't sharpen it.

Most people of course would not make the same decision as you, and will sharpen at two or three stages in the journey to finished images. They will all have sharper photographs than you, and they ( if not you) would tend to regard your work as less sharp than they'd like. If that doesn't concern you , don't sharpen it.

We can if you want go on to consider the same issue about curves and saturation, and other post processing tools. If you think that you can, by taking care, replicate what you saw closely without any post processing , then I fear you will be doomed to constant disappointment. A raw image doesn't look "real". But then of course you will have been disappointed all along, because film and the process of converting film to prints most often represents a visible departure from "reality" and indeed one has to ask quite how anyone can remember exactly what that reality in fact looked like by the time you get your pictures processed. You may think you've been occupying the territory of realism. In fact you've been living in the land of plausibility. You can if you wish do the same thing with digital.

If you want to do all your work behind the lens with nothing altering what you captured...

... you are setting an impossible goal for yourself, one that will likely hamper your photographic vision, and one that is out of step with photography as an art historically. It would also be worth thinking about the difference between seeing an actual scene and viewing it as pigment on paper - it cannot, by definition, possibly be a perfect recreation of the original thing.

There is a lot of misleading stuff written about "doing it all in the camera" and so forth and it often creates a false and misleading set of expectations among photographers. I've actually seen people essentially make that argument that "I don't like digital because if makes a false image. I prefer to shoot real images like Ansel Adams (or fill in your favorite name) did." The problem is that photographers like Adams were emphatic and open about the role of pre- and post-processing in achieving their vision.

As to sharpening, why in the world would you not do it? All it does is more clearly reveal the picture data that is already present in your RAW file. (And don't hold any romantic notions about the "picture" that the sensor captures - what it captures is numerical values corresponding to luminosity levels at photosites, and these are then converted into something that you regard as a photograph... according to someone else's notions of how to best interpret these data.) It isn't a phony or artificial thing to sharpen, and you cannot get an optimally sharp RAW capture image without sharpening.

To eschew sharpening is roughly equivalent to a person with slightly bad vision deciding to not wear corrective lenses since the corrected image "would not be what my eyes recorded."

There is much, much more to say about this... but I may have already worn out my welcome on this topic.

Dan

From a slightly different perspective, while the image in it's native size may please you as sharp enough, as soon as you do any reduction or compression there is a need to sharpen the image to some degree, in order regain detail lost on those processes. "Regain detail" is probably a poor choice of words, but crispness and edge detail is lost to some degree when reduction or compression occurs and light sharpening can restore that crisp look.

If you decide you like "Pictorial" results you may even want to blur things rather than sharpen. Of course, what I'm saying is that it depends on what you want the final thing to look like.

Sharpening is the "rouge" of photography: if it shows, there's too much of it.

Be especially aware that sharpening at smaller sizes may become glaringly obvious at full size in a print or even web image. I've seen some results posted in portfolios and the like where it's all too obvious that it is "mutton dressed as lamb" as they used to say about makeup.

Greetings All,
There is here a strong argument for sharpening, one I can accept. There is perhaps a certain implicit vitriol in some of the comments, but I appreciate your many and nearly immediate responses to my query.