NiK Multimedia sharpening tools

[dpp]

Hello

I am thinking of purchasing the NIK sharperning tools, I use a Lab to print my photos, not a home printer.

Has anyone got any thoughts on the NIK products, if so which one should I purchase, if not has anyone got any other recommendation regarding Sharpening tools, that are Adobe Photoshop Plugins.

Cheers

[chris.bailey]

I have NIK sharpener Pro but to be honest I use CS USM more often. NIK needs to know the properties of what you will be printing on and creates a supposed custom sharpen profile. If you dont know it will be of little use.

It is good for sharpening for Web

[Scottes]

I've heard lots of good things about NiK Sharpener and tried a demo and it was pretty good. It does automate a lot of things for you, and gives you very good sharpening without going into all the little details. However, I like those details, and I didn't like the price of NiK - mainly because I'd want the Pro version to be able to do large print on any printer. For $330 - ouch. But if you just use your own home inkjet the same functionality can be had for $170. That still hurts.

Pixel Genius (Bruce Fraser and others) has an excellent toolset called PhotoKit Sharpener. It's somewhat automated - not nearly as much as NiK - but is set up for a 3-pass sharpening workflow (capture, creative, and output sharpening). It can be memory intensive for large files as it does everything with layers. So if you plan on working on large prints it will want a Gig of RAM, though there are ways around this. It will produce fantastic output but it requires a little effort on your part. It's $100. http://www.pixelgenius.com/sharpener/

Gelnn E. Mitchell II (gmitchell here on CDP) has made a set of actions available for sharpening. They're based on Bruce Fraser's articles on a 3-pass sharpening workflow, the same idea as PhotoKit. Glenn has add some extras, like local contrast enhancement and various edge masks and more. This is a very good set, but requires effort on your part. If you're not familiar with the 3-pass sharpening workflow you'll have some learning to do, and Glenn provides a great tutrial. There aren't any "automated presets" like NiK or PK above, so it helps to read the tutorial. And it's FREE. Check out the actions here (http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/DigitalDarkroom/PhotoshopTools/TLRSharpeningToolkit.htm).

Fred Miranda has a tool called IntelliSharpen II. It's very intelligent with sufficient options to allow you to control things. I live by this tool for web output and recommend it highly. I haven't used this version for prints yet, though I used Version 1 and was less than satisfied. It was sufficient, but I wanted more. I wrote a review of it which is in this thread (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=42134&highlight=intellisharpen). For $25 it's very good, and great for web output.

Lastly I can recommend doing it yourself by reading Bruce Fraser's articles on sharpening, which can be found here (http://www.creativepro.com/author/home/40.html). The book "Real World Adobe Photoshop CS" by Bruce Fraser and David Blatner also goes into sharpening in depth. By the time you read this stuff and practice a bit you can do the 3-pass sharpening workflow yourself. You'll also be a sharpening guru. This is the very hard way though. :-)

[gmitchel]

That's a very nice summary, Scottes! :)

Cheers,

Mitch

[Qurlyjoe]

I bought the NIK Sharpener Pro Inkjet package (I work for a university so I could get it with a significant discount) and am extremely happy with the results. I had tried some of the various tutorials mentioned above (but not all) and one of the problems I ran into consistently was that what I saw on my monitor was not what I'd see when I printed (on an Epson 2200.) Partly this is because I have an LCD monitor so beyond a certain resolution it can't really produce any more detail. Or I can't see it, perhaps, which amounts to the same problem.

But I suspect this will be true for any monitor to some degree. Of course, if you've got money to burn, you can do some experimentation. Fill a page with several different versions of a sample area or two, with different settings for each version, and send that one page to the lab and see what you get back.

With the NIK automated formulas, since I know what I'm printing to, I feel quite confident that I'm getting pretty close to optimum results.

But the original poster of this thread said up front he wants to use a commercial lab. Unless you can get information from the lab about their equipment, you're basically flying blind, no matter what method you use. I have sent shots to mPix using the NIK Inkjet sharpener, and am happy with the result. You mileage may vary, of course.