Alpen-Panoramen, Panorama der Alpen

Sharpness could be a step less, but still a very nice picture!

Obviously it must be the sharpness ... But I must say that I do not do any sharpening in post production. Like all of us, I downscale my panoramas to give them a height of 500px and then convert the file to .jpg extension. Nothing else. Indeed, very often I am forced to decrease the quality of the .jpg file by saving it to 98% or even 95% of the maximum quality in order to reduce its weight below the thresholds set by the site. This unfortunately worsens the final result but honestly I don't know what else to do to respect the parameters of size and weight of the panoramas.

Which tool do you use for downscaling and sharpening? Many people here use for example Irfanview, which usually gives quite good results.

I use Irfanview too. My (very simple) workflow is:
- use Hugin to create the pano with .tiff extension (from single shots in .jpg extension);
- downscale the .tiff file to a height of 500px;
- save this file in .jpg extension;
- check the weight of the .jpg file and then, eventually, save it at 98-97-96-95... % till the file reaches the weight allowed by the site for each width.

Ciao, Alvise

Maybe you can skip one step and open the full sized tiff file directly in Irfanview. Then downscale it to 500px height and save in order to meet the requirements of this site in 95-100%.

Dear Alvise, in addition to Jens' comments, perhaps the following hint: if you have opened Irfanview and uploaded the panorama, then check how the sharpness is set. I think IrfanView offers "20" as standard. I usually adjust the sharpness to a value of 8-12 (20 is often too much in my opinion) and scale the panorama in 3 steps to 500 pixels and sharpen in the 1st and last step. You adjust the sharpness with the hotkey Ctrl+E.

But also sharpening in one step usually gives very good results with IrfanView. When I sharpen with Gimp, I always do it in 3 steps. Good luck - and the panorama is great, but really a bit over-sharpened, like many of your works.

Cheers, Hans-Jörg

for your help. Actually I don't use "sharpen" effect at all, neither on the .tiff original panorama nor on the downscaled .jpg output... Unless Irfanview applies it "by default" (but I don't think so) I cannot understand why my panoramas are always so oversharpened...
Ciao, Alvise

When I started working with Irfan there was an Add-On to install for sharpening. I do not know whether that is the case still.

Anyway: When downscaling in Irfan (are you?) you can set or unset a checkmark for re-sharpening in the downscaling process.

I finally understood what was wrong with downscaling... In Irfan "Resize/resample" mode there is an option "apply sharpen after resample" which I inadvertently always left active... Now I have removed the flag and therefore - except for error - the photo should not sharpen after the height reduction. This does not automatically mean that my panoramas get better, but it is a step forward!
Thanks to everybody for the help.

Glad that I could help, Alvise!

(By the way: I mostly use this sharpening, but it is the only one when downscaling from stitching height to 500 px.)