Does CS3 Camera Raw sharpening eliminate the strategies contained in Bruce Fraser's "Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2?

Thanks

Al Charbonneau

No, it complements them. Camera Raw sharpening in the Detail tab is meant to cover the Capture Sharpening phase of Bruce's proposed sharpening workflow.

thanks

Is there a technological reason regular Unsharp Mask - exactly like Photoshop - can’t be the Details (sharpening) Tab in ACR?

It sure seems to be a consensus - most users not being able to understand how to manage the Capture Sharpening phase properly.
Everything else in Camera Raw is straight forward and continues to get better with each release. The sharpening is just not on par with these other
wonderful improvements.

Well, you would be wrong...the fact is that Camera Raw's sharpening is now (since 4.1) state of the art capture sharpening. Bruce Fraser (who came up with the whole sharpening workflow) was instrumental in the development of Camera Raw's sharpening.

If YOU don't know how to use it, maybe you should learn how. It's not all that hard (and it beats the heck out of Photoshop's USM).

Jeff's response is milder from what I anticipated, since he has been a major force in the sharpening improvements in ACR, which are widely considered to be among the best features recently implemented.

This thread on the Adobe ACR Forum contains quite a few pointers on the new sharpening workflow. Message 21 & 22 mostly have the solution to your question, but that option would be a major step backwards.

Bill

Thanks for that link, Bill. It ties a few observations together for me.

Jeff: Do you know if PhotoKit Sharpener is going to updated to work with Adobe Photoshop CS 4?

Yep, it will be...

Free update (says me hoping?)

Well, to tell the truth, all the current versions of our products have already been tested and work just fine in CS4 (you _DO_ need the most current versions however that are available on the PG web site). The only question is the 64 bit binaries for CS4 64 bit on Win. Those will require work to compile and a new installer to correctly install either the 32 bit or 64 bit versions (depending on the OS). But we're inclined to offer those as a free update, yes.

We are however, working on NEW versions of PhotoKit Sharpener 2 and PhotoKit 2 which will be paid upgrades...they prolly won't launch until early next year.

Excellent. I'm looking forward to the paid upgrades as well. It's the best plug-in I've used for Photoshop.