Sharpening

[Paul Heester]

Have either of you tried High Pass sharpening? Its something Ive been doing recently to my own photos.

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/phot ... high-pass/

[Mike Farley]

Have either of you tried High Pass sharpening? Its something Ive been doing recently to my own photos.

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/phot ... high-pass/

Yes, I have used High Pass. As I said right at the beginning, I rarely sharpen in Photoshop these days as mostly I output from Lightroom and use its sharpening tool which is supplied by Pixel Genius. I use LR not just for printing, but digital output as well. Just about every image I have ever posted to this forum was exported out of Lightroom, which makes it all just so easy. I no longer have to worry about keeping sharpened and unsharpened versions of my images or having a separate sharpened layer, I simply apply the appropriate settings and LR does the rest. I even have presets for forum and club DPI competitions, which makes it easier still.

The kicker is that Pixel Genius Photokit Sharpener costs around £65, which is not much less than a full licence for Lightroom.

[Mike Farley]

The Pixel Genius website was running slowly this morning when I made my earlier post so it was not possible to investigate the differences between the current version of the software and what is implemented in Lightroom. I suspect that what is in Lightroom is based on the original software as a perusal of the manual shows that there are more controls available than those which Lightroom offers, making it possible to tailor the sharpening for individual images. Without trying the latest application, I am not sure how beneficial the enhancements are, but when combined with capture sharpening at the Raw conversion stage, what is available in LR works well.

http://pixelgenius.com/sharpener2/

[Rose]

So do you do absolutely everything in LR these days Mike ? I do almost everything, except resizing and sharpening which I still do in Elements. Also any cloning which might be necessary. I also still prefer to do dodging & burning in PS even though I know I can do it in LR.

[Mike Farley]

So do you do absolutely everything in LR these days Mike ? I do almost everything, except resizing and sharpening which I still do in Elements. Also any cloning which might be necessary. I also still prefer to do dodging & burning in PS even though I know I can do it in LR.

It depends. I use Photoshop as the mechanism to invoke Silver Efex Pro 2 for my mono conversions (and some of my colour work!), as I can convert the layer to a Smart Object and go back to make addjustments later if I wish. Also, I do not find the healing and cloning tools very useful in LR, so I tend to do that in PS as well. Dodging and burning tends to be a mixture as well, but the graduated filter function in LR is very useful for lightening or darkening large areas in an image. Sometimes I use the perspective tools in LR, especially now there are the new automated tools in LR5, sometimes I do it in PS if I cannot get what I want in LR. Just about all my resizing and sharpening is done in LR because it is so quick and simple; I niow quite it quite a pfaff if I end up doing it in PS for some reason. That said, most of my adjustments are done in LR, regardless of whether or not the image ends up in PS. It is not unusual to use just LR and that has been the case for most of my colour shots in my POTD series this year.