Notes

Wherein your fatigued author runs on at the fingers.

Order of Operations

1. Sharpie runs the local contrast filter first.
2. Then the blur filter.
3. Then the pixel punch filter.

Yes, the tabs are backwards, but having Local Contrast as the first tab means it's the one that always appears by default, and that's just dumb. The Punch tab is the one I use the most, so I want it on top instead. Ok?

I'm trying to sharpen, but my image looks more blurred in preview mode.

Sharpie takes the zoom level and preview level into account when creating an image. Preview images are often created using a subsampling of pixels in the original image -- this allows Bibble to generate the preview quite quickly. However, Sharpie's Diameter setting is measured in original image pixels. That's a problem for previewing -- if Sharpie is given a subsampled image but applies a full size "diameter" to it, the results will be very different than when you proof a full sized image. So, that's no good.

Instead, Sharpie reduces the effective diameter of all of its filters when it is given a subsampled preview image. For example, if you are zoomed out to 50%, then when Sharpie creates the preview for your screen, diameters are half the size of the final output diameters.

If Sharpie reduces the diameter of a filter below 1 pixel, that filter is turned off, because mathematically it has no effect.

Perhaps you can see what happens now: If you have a blur filter larger than a sharpening filter, then sometimes in preview mode the Sharpening filter gets disabled because it is too small, while the blur filter is still big enough to show an effect. So, the image looks blurry in preview.

Solution: Make Sharpie's settings when viewing the image at 100%, and don't be concerned if, when zoomed out in preview mode, the image looks a little awkward. It will always print and save correctly.

My machine goes into SWAP when I activate Sharpie!

Yeah. Sharpie wants a lot of memory for its buffers. It's the big trade-off. I can make something fast if I've got a lot of RAM, or I can make it run in very little RAM if it's okay for it to be slow. Considering where Sharpie sits in the workflow (e.g. it will probably be applied to every image you touch), fast is really, really important. Have you looked into buying more RAM lately? It's really not that expensive.

What's up with the weird colour effects when I use the blur filters at values greater than 1.0?

For speed, Sharpie sharpens luminance, defined as the R+G+B channels added together. This makes Sharpie three times faster than it would be otherwise. The difference in effect from a luminance sharpen vs. a full colour sharpen is minimal. However, a luminance blur looks very different from a full colour blur, because the colours are left behind -- they don't get spread out. Nevertheless, with blur at values under 1.0, you probably won't consider the difference in effect a serious problem. And when using low power blur as a "glow" or "gauze" effect, you really don't want colour to be smeared anyway. And as for blur values over 1.0 creating bizarre halos ... think of it as a "special effect" ... and try the threshold slider.

When I use large Local Contrast filters, I sometimes see a faint grid pattern.

This usually only is visible on images with a lot of plain, blank backgrounds. It happens because I cheated. In order to keep the speed of Sharpie at an acceptable level, I don't really run an e.g. 2^9 = 512 pixel diameter convolution. (Have you seen how slow Photoshop is when you do this? That would drive me insane in Bibble!) What happens is that I do a "sparse" convolution, which, when very large diameters are run, only considers some of the pixels within the area of effect. Unfortunately, this can cause a moire effect with camera sensor irregularities on some images, with some cameras.

Temporary Solution: If you see this problem, ease back on the filter. Either reduce the filter size, reduce the power, or just don't use the LCE filter at all. (I don't have this problem on my cameras, but other people have it on theirs. Your experience may vary.)

Long-term Solution: I will fix it by applying more science. I like science.

Holy moley, this thing is slow!

Yes and no. Sharpie itself isn't slow. It is highly optimized for today's processors and runs very, very quickly unless you've chosen a very large Local Contrast filter (and even then, it's pretty fast). The problem is that Sharpie is a "source" plugin, like the lens correction tool, so when you make an adjustment to Sharpie's sliders, Bibble has to go way, way back to the original camera data and start the conversion process from scratch.

For this reason, and because Sharpie's effect happens so much earlier in the "pipeline" than other Bibble controls, I recommend that you do two things:

1. Find good defaults for Sharpie for your camera and shooting style, and save those settings, along with your other starter settings, as Bibble's "default settings." By doing this, Sharpie will already have run before you see images for the first time, and so you won't have to wait for it to run again when you turn it on manually.
2. Adjust sharpening first, or nearly first, when you work with a particular image. If you don't like your defaults, fix Sharpie's settings early on so you don't have to wait while your adjustments run through the pipeline again.
3. Understand if you wait until near the end of your workflow to start using Sharpie, that you're going to have to deal with longer image refresh times. When I go back and visit older images to add Sharpie to them, I get frustrated because it takes soooo looooong to make the adjustments. That's just the way it is. You won't notice this issue when you work on new images, because Sharpie's work is already done.
4. Do not enable Local Contrast filtering in your default. This is the slowest filter in Sharpie, and the one needed the least frequently.

Okay, that's four things.