I have been looking for a better way to sharpen my images. I have been using a sharpening plug in downloaded from another photography site and was happy with it, but not ecstatic as I could not selectively sharpen so the BG often became over sharpened.
After much research I downloaded a trial of PK sharpener http://www.pixelgenius.com/downloads.html
It is a 7 day full function trial after which you must pay $99 US to keep using it. Well my experience was so good I bought it after 3 days of use.
The program is not for someone who wants a fast solution. While the results are absolutely the best I have obtained, there is a learning curve of a day or so and a specific work flow to be used. It is not hard and once you get the hang of it it is not tedious, but it is not as fast as simple USM or Smart Sharpen.
First thing you must do is be sure the sharpening is turned off of your RAW converter. Adjust the RAW conversion parameters as always but without any sharpening. After opening in CS2 the first thing I do with high ISO files is to use Noise Ninja (if the ISO is low I skip the noise reduction step); then PK sharpener applied using the "capture" sharpening menu. There are several options depending on camera and type of image. The PDF manual by PixleGenius is good to help you decide.
Since PK Sharpener works via layers I find it useful at this point to flatten the image. Now do what ever you normally do to your images except resizing. After any image tweaks are completed open thePK Sharpener "Creative Sharpening" menu. Here you can choose to sharpen the entire image or selectively sharpen (or even smooth) any area of the image. Again there are several flavors of sharpening to choose from. The manual and experience will teach you how to decide. After this round of sharpening I save my image as a TIFF (any file format will do, but I suggest not JPEG) with layers not flattened.
Now is the time to resize the image for printing, web, or any other output. If you are going to print resize to the desired size then open the "PK Sharpen for Output" menu and choose the applicable button. There is a button for ink jet, web, conetone, and half tone. I have only used Ink Jet and Web. I do not save this image at this stage as I can always call it up again and reapply the appropriate sharpening before sending it to what ever output I desire.
That's it. It actually is harder to write and read about it than actually doing it. the results are fantastic. Without a doubt it is the best sharpener I have used. I get no halos and images are sharp where they need to be without oversharpening issues. I really like the selctive sharpening and smoothing features.
I've been using photokit sharpener for over a year now and agree that it is a nice program. Bruce Fraser, one of the developers of Photokit Sharpener, has just published a book--Real World Image Sharpening-- which describes the sharpening methods that he used to create Photokit Sharpener. It is a little expensive at 40 bucks for ~270 pages. Also there are a number of excellent tutorials at Glenn Mitchell's site:
http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/digital-darkroom.htm
In my opinion, the tutorials are almost as good as the book.
Glenn also has some actions and scripts that provide a sharpening workflow similar to Photokit Sharpener. I've done some side-by-side comparisons of his sharpening product and Photokit Sharpener and find that they produce similar results. Mitchell's scripts run very slowly on my computer, but the actions run smoothly. If you're interested in the concept of three phases of sharpening (capture, creative, and output), I'd recommend reading the tutorials at Glenn Mitchell's site first.
Posted by Bill Chambers on September 15, 2006 at 8:02 PM
Hi Ed - I don't get over the the Eqiupment Review forum very often, but did want to say I definitely agree with your assessment. PK is a great tool, but I did find their documatation rather poor. I wish they had gone into more detail on the many Creative Sharpening options they offer. Still, a great tool, and very flexible.
Discussion
2 repliesAfter much research I downloaded a trial of PK sharpener
http://www.pixelgenius.com/downloads.html
It is a 7 day full function trial after which you must pay $99 US to keep using it. Well my experience was so good I bought it after 3 days of use.
The program is not for someone who wants a fast solution. While the results are absolutely the best I have obtained, there is a learning curve of a day or so and a specific work flow to be used. It is not hard and once you get the hang of it it is not tedious, but it is not as fast as simple USM or Smart Sharpen.
First thing you must do is be sure the sharpening is turned off of your RAW converter. Adjust the RAW conversion parameters as always but without any sharpening. After opening in CS2 the first thing I do with high ISO files is to use Noise Ninja (if the ISO is low I skip the noise reduction step); then PK sharpener applied using the "capture" sharpening menu. There are several options depending on camera and type of image. The PDF manual by PixleGenius is good to help you decide.
Since PK Sharpener works via layers I find it useful at this point to flatten the image. Now do what ever you normally do to your images except resizing. After any image tweaks are completed open thePK Sharpener "Creative Sharpening" menu. Here you can choose to sharpen the entire image or selectively sharpen (or even smooth) any area of the image. Again there are several flavors of sharpening to choose from. The manual and experience will teach you how to decide. After this round of sharpening I save my image as a TIFF (any file format will do, but I suggest not JPEG) with layers not flattened.
Now is the time to resize the image for printing, web, or any other output. If you are going to print resize to the desired size then open the "PK Sharpen for Output" menu and choose the applicable button. There is a button for ink jet, web, conetone, and half tone. I have only used Ink Jet and Web. I do not save this image at this stage as I can always call it up again and reapply the appropriate sharpening before sending it to what ever output I desire.
That's it. It actually is harder to write and read about it than actually doing it. the results are fantastic. Without a doubt it is the best sharpener I have used. I get no halos and images are sharp where they need to be without oversharpening issues. I really like the selctive sharpening and smoothing features.
http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/digital-darkroom.htm
In my opinion, the tutorials are almost as good as the book.
Glenn also has some actions and scripts that provide a sharpening workflow similar to Photokit Sharpener. I've done some side-by-side comparisons of his sharpening product and Photokit Sharpener and find that they produce similar results. Mitchell's scripts run very slowly on my computer, but the actions run smoothly. If you're interested in the concept of three phases of sharpening (capture, creative, and output), I'd recommend reading the tutorials at Glenn Mitchell's site first.