2008-01-04
I use PhotoKit Sharpener whenever I print, mostly because it does a much better job than I can and, unlike me, is totally automatic. Ever since I started using it my prints have looked terrific, with more resolution than I thought my printer, an Epson R1800, was capable of.
But I never worried about sharpening JPEGs that I posted on the web, figuring that whatever generic sharpening I did in Lightroom was good enough. Nobody can see the difference in a JPEG, I thought.
But I thought wrong. The other day I tried using PK Sharpener (which has a web output option) on a JPEG, and the difference was very apparent, as you can see for yourself in this comparison:
These are two JPEGs placed next to each other on my Mac screen and then captured from the screen and exported as a JPEG for posting here.
Look carefully at the grass at the center of each image. Do you see that the grass on the left has more definition? That's the one that was done with PK Sharpener. The one on the right was sharpened in Lightroom. I suppose it's possible that someone better than I am could do as well in Lightroom, but I doubt it, since the Lightroom sharpening model is much less powerful than what's available in Photoshop.
Now my problem is that I've seen the difference so I want to run all my JPEGs through PK Sharpener, which means running them through Photoshop, which is where PK Sharpener works (it's a plug-in). My workflow has become more complicated: Instead of uploading JPEGs directly from Lightroom, I have to export them as PSDs, open them in Photoshop, run PK Sharpener twice (once for capture sharpening, and once for output sharpening), and then export the sharpened JPEG. For printing going into Photoshop is OK, since I print so few images and want to use Photoshop's soft proofing anyway, but for JPEGs it's a nuisance, even though I put together some actions to make the work in Photoshop automatic.
I did it anyway for the images in my new gallery (link at top), and the difference is readily apparent. There's a clarity and depth to the images that wasn't there before. (This doesn't affect any prints I make from the images in the gallery, because prints are made from the original raws—there's no intermediate JPEG involved.)
It's rumored that the Pixel Geniuses who make PK Sharpener are developing a plug-in for Lightroom, using some plug-in architecture that hasn't yet been released by Adobe. I sure hope so!