Soft focus

[saturndude]

Hello,

I captured a made-for-TV movie from film today. It seemed to have soft focus.

Other threads here say the TV is "soft focus" compared to my monitor. So things should look naturally sharper on the TV, right?

I can use the ATI software to sharpen as I capture, or other software afterwards.

Before I go through the act of authoring a disc, should I bother sharpening if the source is soft to begin with?

[guns1inger]

If the image is already soft, then if anything it will look softer on your TV. A softer playback device will not sharpen a soft image.

If the focus is deliberately soft (the "Sybil Shepard" look) then there isn't a lot you can do. Sharpening will more than likely do little more than make any noise in the image more apparent, and make edges halo.

[lordsmurf]

If the image is already soft, then if anything it will look softer on your TV. A softer playback device will not sharpen a soft image.

Well, that's not exactly right either.

He's referring to optical illusions. It's true that a softer image will appear sharp when viewed on a device incapable of showing it to be sharper. Nothing to compare it to, going from channel to channel.