Sharpening and the Monitor

Unless the monitor is your final output, making images look sharp on the monitor almost invariably results in an undersharpened print. But monitors themselves vary hugely in the way they reproduce sharpness.

Monitor Technologies

LCD displays are much sharper than CRT displays. An image that looks sharp on an LCD display may still look soft on a CRT. An image that looks sharp on a CRT display may look slightly crunchy on an LCD.

If your images are destined for a specific type of display, for example, a kiosk, you should ideally look at the images on that display before making any final judgments. If your images are being prepared for the Web, realize that you have very little control over what the other billion or so Web users will see.

Nowadays, many more users have LCD displays than have CRT displays. All you can do is to aim for the middle of a very large barn door, but an LCD display is likely to be more representative of the general Web population than is a CRT.

Monitor Resolution

The resolution of the display also has a major impact on how we see sharpening. An image that looks pleasingly sharp on a display running at 1600 x 1200 displays obvious, less-pleasing sharpening haloes on the same display running at 1024 x 768. This is simply because the pixels are displayed at a larger size when the display is run at 1024 x 768, so the sharpening haloes become more obvious because they're bigger.

Again, if you're sharpening images for the Web, you need to aim for the "average" condition, which is probably closer to 1024 x 768 than to 1600 x 1200.