Are any of the currently available sharpening plug-ins for PS significantly better than the others? I have been looking around and can't really find a clear difference. Are they significantly better than PS itself, of just easier to apply.

I have been looking specifically at the NIK Sharpener 3.0. Sort of spendy in my opinion, unless it is really worth the money. Right now they have a deal where you can get Sharpener 3.0 and their noise reducation plug-in (Dfine 2.0) for the price they normally change just for the Sharpener ($199.95). I normally use NeatImage for noise and am satisfied, but have never used any others.

I recently took advantage of the deal you mentioned for Sharpener Pro and Dfine and now have the whole Nik suite.

I really like their products; however, they do not work with CS4 64 bit. Nik says they will. Eventually. No doubt when they do, it will involve a paid upgrade to the next version.

To answer your question, I find that I'm getting significantly better sharpening results than I was using just PS. I suspect if you're skilled enough and patient enough you can produce very similar results in PS, but for me it was worth the price. The Upoint technology plus the ability to paint on the sharpening to just the desired areas are standout features for me.

You can watch brief tutorials on their various products on Nik's website. You can also download fully functional trial versions.

Hope this helps.

DIS Ottawa wrote:

I really like their products; however, they do not work with CS4 64 bit. Nik says they wil. Eventually. No doubt when they do, it will involve a paid upgrade to the next version.

Hope this helps.


Oh man...this is a killer for me. I recently moved to all 64-bit, and running PS and LR as 64-bit apps is such an improvment I won't be going back.

Damn...guess I keep looking, or wait for an update.

Let us know if you come up with anything. I'm in the same boat, I switched to Win7 64 bit largely to run PS & LR as 64bit apps (& there's no going back!).

I can only find one sharpening app that is truly 64-bit, but I know nothing about how it works.

http://www.outbackphoto.com/filters/dopf003_easys_toolkit/DOPEasySPlusToolkit.html

PixelGenius appears to be close... .http://www.pixelgenius.com/

I have Photokit Sharpner and NIK Sharpener Pro. But, I often sharpen my images using only Photoshop's tools. If you have a good understanding of various sharpening approaches, you can get just as good, actually often much better, results with Photoshop. Deke McClelland has an advanced sharpening class over on lynda.com. It will definitely get you to an all Photoshop workflow ... unfortunately, the class is something like 10 hours ... but, worth it. I guess that is the value of these plugins ... ramp up time is small.

I got the Nik bundle for Ligjhtroom. Nik Sharpener works fine in LR 64bit. In Photoshop I still prefer to sharpen with the high pass filter.

Gordon