With all of the photo purchases that I need to make, I want to spend my money wisely. I mean I need to upgrade to CS3, I just bought a 40D and next will be the grip and so on and so on. (You know how it goes!) And I have read a lot of praises for Photokit Sharpener and am considering purchasing this as well. My concern is that Lightroom is going to come out with better output sharpening and then I may end up having spent $100 for PK when I did not need to.

Thanks for any input and advice you can provide.

Regards,
Pat

I quess you have to ask yourself if you can wait. LR has been out less than a year, and soft proofing and output sharpening are both things that some have been wanting. But I don't see an upgrade for LR for at least another 6 to 8 months, and we don't know if those two items will or can be included. I would definetly upgrade to CS3 but I would also get PK Sharpener as it also has much more than input and output sharpening, unless you want to continue to wait for the latest and greatest. Of course as soon as you do, the next latest and greatest thing to come along, will. Do you want to wait for that one? Or the next one?
If you wait long enough, you'll have nothing to show for it!

With the right knowledge CS3 has all the sharpening tools you should need, however I am a PK user and I feel having the automation options available are priceless.

Jim

Actually I am not one to wait and wait for something better, and that is not what I am doing here. I mean today I am pretty satisfied with my print quality (but I may not know what I am missing.) Also, I am sure I will upgrade Lightroom when an upgrade comes along so if the next upgrade of Lightroom will offer adequate output sharpening, then I will prioritize my spending accordingly. However is PK Sharpener offers some functionality that LR is not likely to offer, then I may decide I need both. As most others do, I have a limited amount of spend that I need to prioritize, and that is what I am trying to do.

Pat

Pat,
There's a demo version of PKS on Pixel Genius website. You could compare prints done via Lightroom and to those done with PS + PKS.

I might be different from a lot of folks here but although I used to like PKS (and still do) I've quit using it. I find that the 'capture' sharpening in LR coupled with the fairly crude print sharpening works decently for small prints. So in this case I can often avoid a round trip to PS, PKS and back to print.

When I print large, and I often do, I've run into some issues. Doing this I've exported the image from LR to PS, uprezzed in size to the final print output and then applied PKS output sharpening. It is after this that I have a major problem. Now I cannot (often) bring that print back into LR as it exceeds the LR size limitation. I don't like printing from PS for a number of reasons and was much happier doing this either from LR of Qimage. So I ran a few tests and found that for much of what I was doing the PS uprezzed file, sharpened with PKS and printed was in fact an inferior print than the same file, retained in LR and then upressed 'on the fly' and smart sharpened as it was printed by Qimage. To top it off it meant I didn't have to round trip to PS and it save a ton of disk space as I keep the final print images as well!

So at the end of the day I've found that I no longer use/need PKS. Small prints are capture sharpened in LR and then printed from LR. Large prints are capture sharpened in LR and then 'edited' from LR in Qimage (you can set up Qimage as a secondary program for editing from LR) and printed from the original image. Qimage upresses appropriately for the printer driver and smart sharpens on the fly - it does a tremendous job from my perspective.

I don't care for PKS capture sharpening. I think it's the edge mask that I have a problem with. AA filter and Bayer demosaicing don't just affect edges, they also affect fine details which PKS capture sharpening don't seem to work very well for in my experience. I can get better results sharpening myself in PS.

For output sharpening of small prints I let QImage handle it. For large prints I prefer the workflow described in an Outback Photo article which involves up-rezzing with Bicubic Smoother, sharpening, and then down-rezzing with Bicubic Sharper.

I still use creative and output PK sharepning, but I find MUCH better, smoother results using LR for the capture sharpening. Hopefully the next LR upgrade will fill in those two missing blanks, and I can eliminate the PK step all together.

I haven't used PKS but wonder if it's their program causing your print issues or the uprezzing damaging your files since you are sharpening pixels that don't exist? Just wondering out loud here.

You need to sharpen after upsizing. PKS has a sharpener for that task too. Discussed in the From Camera to Print video.

Of all the cash I have spent on Photography over the past few year, Photokit Sharpner and Colour plugins have provided a fantastic return, being used in most of my work in some way or another.

I don't disagree that there may be ways to tweak a some more from a file, but for someone who enjoys the creation rather than the absolute science of making images from digital files then the PKS range will take you a long way with only a modest investment in study!

You may want to give this freebie a shot. If it works for you, your $100 can be applied eleswhere.

http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/TLRSharpeningToolkit.htm

I purchased PKS about two months ago and find that it produces excellent, consistent results and speeds up my workflow significantly. I do not use the capture sharpen though, because it seems to create too many artifacts.

I my opinion, this is $100 well spent.

I have used PKS since it's availabilty and have never seen this. Do you see this in your print, meaning that you have made a print right after you've done the capture sharpening? Or do you see these artifacts on your monitor(which is not the best place to judge sharpening effects)?