PixelGenius – Sharpening
For years folks have gone on about the perils of sharpening images. Some completely over do it, while others don’t do it at all. It is a religion for a lot of photographers, and I must confess, until recently, was one of them.
Way back when I first started using Photoshop, when I was a newbie to digital imaging, I would sharpen everything I scanned. It was exciting. It made the images look really impressive. What I didn’t know at the time was that sharpening can have side effects on the quality of your images when it comes to resizing them at a later date. So as I became more aware of sharpening and its issues, I began to not sharpen anything at all.
For those of you who do not know what sharpening is, I must stress that it is not a feature that adds detail to any image. It is a feature that gives perceived improved resolution by adding contrast to the edges of objects within the frame. Over do it, and the picture can start to look hard. Halo effects can be introduced too if you’re not too careful. IMHO, it takes a long time to perfect the amount of sharpening and ratio of sharpening effects that should be applied to an image. This is directly attributable to our ability to look at a photograph (it takes years to be able to read a photograph on a technical level) and also, the quality of the monitor we use to apply the sharpening with.
A few months ago, while I was researching printers and workflow – which I am extremely happy with, I was introduced to PixelGenius. It is a sharpening plug-in for Photoshop and it can help you make a good print an excellent print. It can also help you sharpen your images for the web too. I’ve had amazing results from using the product to sharpen for web and of course, with inkjets too.
Where I was once deadly against sharpening, I’m now all for it….. with some caveats:
1. My original files are left unsharpened.
2. I duplicate my TIFF scans and resize to the medium I want to use them for
3. I sharpen after resizing, not before
There are several reasons to use sharpeners such as PixelGenius. They help overcome issues with scanners and digital sensors creating soft images. In digital sensors, anti-aliasing filters soften the image to reduce moire patterns. Not all device captures are perfect, so Pixel Genius has three stages of sharpening:
1. Capture Sharpening
2. Creative Sharpening
3. Output Sharpening
As the names suggest, they have preset sharpeners for the capture medium. I use 6×7 medium format film, and I find the ’6×6 positive film sharpener’ fantastic for this.
The creative sharpeners are used in the same way we use dodging and burning. You dodge an image to bring prominence to that part of the scene and you burn in areas where you want to make the area darker and therefore lead the eye away. The same is true for sharpening. Sharpen the entire file and your eye may be distracted by objects that have too much detail in them (yes, that’s right – too much). By applying creative sharpeners to certain areas of the scene, you can lead the eye towards, and also away from certain areas of the scene.
And finally, the output sharpening algorithms are fantastic for helping you get the best jpegs for web and the best results for sending files to your inkjet printer. If you’re not doing anything like this, then your prints aren’t half as good as they could be.
If you’d like to read more about Pixel Genius, then they have an excellent user manual which is available for free on their web site.
Sharpening is a creative part of the image making process. It is just as important as contrast masks and dodging and burning. By reading the PixelGenius user manual, you’ll not only get a good education on sharpening and why you would want to use it, you will also get an introduction to a plug in that simplifies sharpening for you, making it easy for you to get great results, while cutting down the possible chances of making bad mistakes with your image editing.
Really interesting post., Bruce, thank you.
I’ve just looked up PixelGenius and was surpirsed at how affordable it is, so considering investing!
I wanted to ask a couple of things first, ( apologies if they are obvious questions)
1- Would you still apply the normal ‘sharpening ‘ of raw file in the raw file conversion workflow process before going through the Pixel perfect plug-in?
2- I had recently read a tutorial on using the ‘high pass’ filter in photoshop for sharpening which can be used creatively/selectively by using adjustment layers.
Does this come anywhere near the sort of results with Pixel Genius? I suspect not, but thought I’d ask! Maybe it’s a completely different process.
(my own version of working through the high pass filter here): http://pinkpigphotography.com/2011/04/12/sharpening-with-high-pass-filter/)
Comment by pinkpig — 26 July, 2011 @ 3:17 pm
Hi Pink Pig,
Yes, there wasn’t enough space to cover everything about this plug-in, and the user manual you can download does a very good job of covering everything you’d need to know.
But to answer your questions:
1. You should turn of sharpening everywhere else, except for Pixel Genius. Sharpening a sharpened file will leads to really horrible and unpredictable results. Their algorithms are based on assuming the files are completely unsharpened. This means turning sharpening off in Adobe Camera Raw (default is to apply sharpening).
2. Pixel Genius uses high-pass sharpening, and many other ways of applying sharpening. But the beauty of it all is that it does so as layers – so it’s non-destructive. You can switch if off and on, turn the opacity down, and also alter the sharpening for highlight and shadow areas of the lines it wants to sharpen – each layer consists of two sub layers – one for the sharpening of highlights and the other for the shadows).
It’s far more sophisticated than rolling your own sharpener in PS. The beauty of the application is that you choose what sort of medium you’ve got, and it presents you with a list of presets, all take into account the size of file you have. So there’s very little tweaking involved.
Have a read of their manual. It explains all this in a very nice and easy fashion.
And yes, it’s quite cheap isn’t it?
Comment by Bruce Percy — 26 July, 2011 @ 3:37 pm
Ok- that all makes sense, thanks! Will check out the manual
Comment by pinkpig — 26 July, 2011 @ 4:02 pm
No problem Pinkpig,
The manual is great and does a better job at explaining it than I could !
:-)
Comment by Bruce Percy — 26 July, 2011 @ 5:39 pm
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for this pointer. I’ve been having a play with the trial version and, on the basis of my couple of hours of experimenting so far, I cannot imagine /not/ buying the tool. I’ve been looking for an easy, flexible and effective way to do sharpening for quite some time now and this really fits the bill perfectly.
Great stuff!
Mike
Comment by MikeDGreen — 27 July, 2011 @ 12:49 am
Mike,
It does a brilliant job. I can’t stress enough that reading the manual will really help too.
There do seem to be some slight downsides – I’ve noticed a bug with the web sharpener – that module disappears from time to time. They know about the issue so I’m sure it will get fixed.
This tool is really important and a must for getting the best prints you can from your printing system.
Comment by Bruce Percy — 27 July, 2011 @ 8:23 am
The manual is, indeed, excellent – one of the best I’ve seen on any software product. Not only is it clear and well-written, it manages to achieve the rather challenging goal of being ‘entertaining to read’!
Licence purchased ;-)
I shall attempt to resist the temptation to go back and reprocess my favourite images….. at least for a while!
Mike
Comment by MikeDGreen — 27 July, 2011 @ 12:38 pm