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PhotoKit Sharpener

Rather27Rather27 Registered Users Posts: 115 Major grins
edited April 7, 2010 in Finishing School
who uses it? and what's your techniques?
jesserather.com

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    CynthiaMCynthiaM Registered Users Posts: 364 Major grins
    edited April 6, 2010
    Rather27 wrote:
    who uses it? and what's your techniques?

    I use it, a lot. Many times the only reason I will take an image into Phtoshop from Lightroom is to use their creative sharpening tools for selective sharpening. I rarely have a need to use the capture sharpening, as their algorithms have been incorporated in the develop module of Lightroom. The only time I use their capture sharpener is on a very noisy image. I will turn off all sharpening in LR, bring the image into Photoshop, run noise reduction then apply capture sharpening, the idea there being that to capture sharpen before noise reduction would also be sharpening the noise so you want to get rid of the noise, first. I don't use their output sharpening as much as I used to as again, the algoritms have been incorporated into the print module and also into the web module in Lightroom, but occasionally, if sending an mage to a lab, most of the lab printers use contone printing, so i use the ouput sharpening in Photokit set to contone and sometimes I don't want the output sharpening to be global, so I will do it in Photshop where I can mask.
    Cynthia Merzer
    My Fine Art Photography
    My Infrared Photography
    www.CynthiaMerzerPhotography.com
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    malchmalch Registered Users Posts: 104 Major grins
    edited April 7, 2010
    Rather27 wrote:
    who uses it? and what's your techniques?

    Not many takers here so I'll chime in with my 2 cents.

    I do my RAW conversion using Capture NX -- I find the NR and sharpening there to be woefully inadequate and that's usually what drives me to push the image into Photoshop which offers many more better options.

    I looked at PhotoKit Sharpener but it didn't work out well for me. I think that some of the TLR tools offer rather more flexibility and were a much better fit for me. They are also free! I especially like these sharpening scripts (covering capture, creative, and output sharpening):

    http://www.thelightsright.com/TLRProfessionalSharpeningToolkit

    and this very general purpose script for creating edge and surface masks:

    http://www.thelightsright.com/tlrprofessionalmasktoolkit

    The ebook/video tutorials cost a few bucks but I think they're worth it if you want to learn a lot more about sharpening in general:

    http://www.thelightsright.com/sharpeningyourphotographs
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