Nik Sharpener Pro

Stage 2, Creative Sharpening

In the Creative Sharpening stage, you apply sharpening selectively to enhance more important features in the photo. For example, if you were sharpening a portrait, you might apply additional sharpening to the subject’s eyes to make them more prominent. You apply creative sharpening after adjustments to improve colour, tone or add special effects. It’s used as a final step in the processing of the image.

Importantly, if you’re going to be resizing your image, it’s applied after the resizing. If you don’t, the resizing can reduce or exaggerate the sharpening effect depending on if you’re or increasing or reducing the image size.

Creative sharpening’s applied selectively, and the sharpening routines used are stronger than in Capture Sharpening. This helps to emphasise the fine details in the photo. It also helps to add a feeling of depth to the image.

You apply Capture sharpening in the Nik Sharpener Pro output sharpening module. The Nik software has combined this stage with the Output Sharpening stage discussed next. This makes sense because you apply both as a final step of image processing.

Stage 3, Output Sharpening

The Output Sharpening stage addresses any additional sharpening you might need to make the image appear at it’s best. This is easiest to understand when you consider inkjet printing. When you make a print using an inkjet, the ink sprays onto the paper and soaks into the surface. As part of this, there is some bleed or spreading of the ink which causes the image to soften. Output Sharpening addresses this softening effect.

In this video, I demonstrate both Creative and Output Sharpening using the Output Sharpener module of Nik Sharpener Pro.

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Sharpener Pro is one of the plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection. It’s not an effects tool, but an image enhancement tool in the save vein as Dfine. Just as Dfine aims to bring a bit of control and precision to noise reduction, Sharpener Pro does the same for image sharpening.

And it does it by splitting sharpening into two steps – into two plug-ins, as a matter of fact – a RAW Presharpener and an Output Sharpener.

This is an important distinction often overlooked by photographers trying to make their pictures look as sharp as possible, because you need to sharpen images in different ways at different times. There’s ‘capture’ sharpening’, which you use to overcome any lens softness, slight blur or other weaknesses in the original picture, and then there’s ‘output sharpening’ which needs to be matched carefully to your picture’s intended use.

The RAW Presharpener covers capture sharpening and creative sharpening. It’s good at sharpening up the slight softness you see with all digital camera images at a pixel level, but it doesn’t have the radius, amount and threshold sliders of a regular Unsharp Mask tool, so it’s no good for trying to disguise more serious blur from focus errors or camera shake.

How it works

The controls are at least simple. The Adaptive Sharpening slider effectively controls the strength of the sharpening effect, while the Sharpen Areas/Sharpen Edges slider sets the balance between edge sharpening and texture sharpening. If all of this produces too much noise you can try clicking the High ISO radio button below.

You can control which areas are sharpened or protected using control points – you use a ‘plus’ (+) point to confine the sharpening to a specific area, leaving the rest of the image unaffected, and you use a ‘minus’ (-) point to remove sharpening from a specific area but leave it applied to the rest.

It has the potential to be a neat and effective way of creating differential sharpness, but the RAW Presharpener sharpening is too subtle and limited for it to be useful. Frankly, if you want a clearly visible ‘bokeh’ effect or more obvious creative blur, you’re going to use a tool like Analog Efex Pro instead.

The Output Sharpener is interesting because it matches the sharpening to the size of the image and the display or medium it will be displayed on. This is important, because the sharpening settings needed for display on a computer monitor are very different to those needed for an A4-sized print – and different again for a billboard poster.

This is because sharpening is an carefully-balanced optical illusion. It exaggerates the contrast around object edges to make them appear sharper, but at the same time this creates artefacts and edge halos which – you hope – are small enough not to be noticed. The ‘sweet spot’ for sharpening settings is different for every output device and print size. So the Output Sharpener deserves some credit for addressing this directly with drop-down menus for the output device, paper type, viewing distance and printer resolution.

Once you’ve got that right, you have sliders for Output Sharpening Strength, Structure, Local Contrast and Focus (whatever that is). These are part of a Creative Sharpening panel, which is a tad odd since most photographers would apply creative sharpening before the output stage.

The Output Sharpener is the strongest of the two tools by some margin, but even here you may prefer to use the sharpening tools in your host application instead. Besides, if you’re producing images for publication, you often need to leave the sharpening to the designer because you won’t know what size the image is being printed at or the particular foibles/requirements of the printer.