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. 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. If all of this produces too much noise you can try clicking the High ISO radio button below. 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. 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. The RAW Presharpener covers capture sharpening and creative sharpening. 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. 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. Just as Dfine aims to bring a bit of control and precision to noise reduction, Sharpener Pro does the same for image sharpening.Īnd 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.

It’s not an effects tool, but an image enhancement tool in the save vein as Dfine.

Sharpener Pro is one of the plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection. That aside, though, its ‘capture sharpening’ tools, designed to counteract camera and lens softness, feel like they’re just a little too late in the workflow, when most of us would apply sharpening during RAW processing, or in the ‘host’ application used to launch Sharpener Pro. Its output sharpening tools are a reminder that images need to be optimised to look their best on different printers, and at different sizes.

Nik sharpener pro 3