Mastering the Nik Collection- 21: Sharpener Pro 3 RAW Presharpening

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from online photography training.com welcome to my video series mastering the Nik collection several years ago the Nik collection of plugins was the number one set of plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom cashing in on their success they sold off to Google Google marketed the suite for a couple years with a few updates then they announced that they would not be updating the software any longer and they made it free to download around that time I did a set of training videos on the software that proved to be very popular recently the company DxO purchased the rights to the Nik collection and announced that they would be developing and updating it although it's no longer free it is nice to have a caretaker for this software because it is very good with all the good things happening with Nik I decided to update my training videos on the product this new series will be more in-depth and thorough than the previous series please be aware that I have no affiliation with the company I'm not being paid by them to do these videos and if you purchase the software I will not be making a commission on the sale with that said if you could do me a favor if you like these videos please click the thumbs up button and share them finally if you can make a donation I would greatly appreciate it that info is in the description below this video along with a link to my code of ethics statement let's get started episode we're gonna take our first look at sharpener Pro 3 raw pre sharpening now when you looked at all the applications in your NIC package you probably noticed that there's two different sharpening apps included one is sharpener Pro 3 raw pre sharpening and the other one is sharpener pro 3 output sharpening Nick subscribes to this so-called 3-step sharpening method that a lot of people like to use that is one is pre sharpening you do that early in your workflow and you would use sharpener Pro 3 raw pre sharpening for that the second step is later in your workflow you may want to do some creative sharpening maybe sharpen the feathers of the bird but not the background or maybe you want to sharpen models eyes but not their skin that's creative sharpening and you would do that later in your workflow and you could use sharpener Pro 3 raw pre sharpening for that as well step 3 is output sharpening and that is when your image is really done but now you're either going to share it online or print it so you do some output sharpening and you would use sharpener Pro 3 output sharpening for that now neither one of the two applications work standalone you have to use them as a plugin and as you can see I have Lightroom open now I do recommend that if you shoot RAW and you want to use sharpen or pro 3 raw pre sharpener that you use the workflow I recommend because I hate the name of this application specifically raw sharper Pro 3 raw pre sharpening it does not work on RAW files it will only work on TIFF JPEG or PSD files so I don't know why they named it that except that I think they mean that you should do it early in your workflow so with that said you're going to have to take your raw file and convert it to a tiff JPEG or PSD and when you do that conversion some things get baked in to that TIFF JPEG or PSD and they're more diff hope to change then if you were working on the original war file more specifically is white balance white balance is very easy to alter in a raw file you can just go to the basic tab go to the white balance drop down then pick a white balance or you could use the eyedropper or just move the sliders well once you convert this or you create the JPEG TIFF PSD file from the raw file these settings get baked in so it's a little more difficult to change your white balance not impossible just a little more difficult the other thing I recommend you do to your raw file before you pre sharpen it is choose your profile now you could switch profiles in a JPEG TIFF PSD but it's slightly different in the raw file for example with a raw file right now I have Adobe standard profile applied if I want to switch this profile to something different it will completely remove the Adobe standard profile and replace it with the new profile conversely on a JPEG TIFF or PSD file that profile this Adobe Stamp standard profile got baked into that and then when I choose a different profile it really just lays that profile on top of the Adobe's in this case Adobe standard profile so it's not the same thing so I do recommend you choose your profile now too after you do that I recommend that you apply lens Corrections now this isn't as important you usually could apply lens Corrections to the JPEG TIFF or PSD but you might as well do it now I think get it out of the way now once you've done that you could send it over into the pre sharpening program but I do recommend that you do something else first first of all look under the detail tab see if Lightroom added any sharpening to your image many times with RAW files for some manufacturers you'll have sharpening set to either 25 or 40 in some cases I've seen it on some cameras it's not good to add sharpening on sharpening so you don't want a sharpen in Lightroom and then sharpen in sharpen or pro 3 raw pre sharpening so take this down to zero if you add it if there's any sharpening there furthermore I recommend that you remove noise now so either go to the noise reduction part of Lightroom right here and remove noise it's always good to remove noise before you sharpen an image it's just easier to do and then it's another reason to use the pre sharpener because when you do remove noise you are softening the image a little bit so you might as well do it now and then sharpen afterwards it works better it's easier to remove the noise and then the sharpening is more effective if you do not want to use Lightroom's noise reduction sliders you could use define so at this point I would send it in to define to remove noise then I would send the image into sharpener Pro 3 raw pre sharpening so I hope that made sense that's my recommended workflow it's not written in stone see what works for you now for this demonstration I'm not removing noise at all because I want to demonstrate in Sharper pro 3 raw pre sharpening what happens when it sharpens the noise and how you could deal with it because it may happen to you so I have this image I already I'm settled on my white balance I've settled on my profile I applied lens Corrections and I'm not going to do I brought a sharpening down to zero and I'm not going to do any noise reduction because I want to demonstrate what I'm going to demonstrate now I want to send it into sharpener Pro 3 raw pre sharpener I'm going to right click on the image go down to edit in then I'm going to go down to sharpen or pro 3 raw pre sharpener and of course this dialog box comes up and again the only choice because it doesn't work on RAW files the only choice is to edit a copy with Lightroom adjustments you have the choice a tiff PSD or JPEG I recommend TIFF it just works faster I found it works best colorspace by default it's going to show srgb that's the smallest color space and again the color space gets baked into this in case in this a step file so I want to use the most colors available so I want to go to prophoto RGB that's the largest color space the other two are smaller and it does go in order srgb is the smallest in this case display p3 is the second smallest you may not have that depending on what kind of monitor you're using Adobe RGB you will have that's the second biggest and then the biggest is prophoto RGB and that's what I want to use 16 bits per component I want to use that now resolution don't go lower than 240 I recommend most people and most application companies recommend that you put 300 here for a 300 resolution that works great if you're using an Epson printer epson recommends 360 so I have Epson printer so I'll put 360 there and I'm not gonna use any compression I'm going to click Edit now what's going to happen is Lightroom in the top left hand corner you'll see this progress bar it's creating the TIFF file with those attributes I just dialed in it's going to open in to the raw pre sharpener and it's right here now it actually added sharpening right away to the image now I'm going to zoom in by just now in the top right hand corner if you're on this little arrow the select tool and you want to zoom in just double click on the point you want to zoom in a loop and zoom in on the bird's eye and it zooms in and once it renders I'll go up here in the top left hand corner you see where it says preview I'm gonna click that box off and there's before and there's after I'm not sure you could see it in the video this subtle but it did add some pretty sharpening now again you're doing this because one you may have done noise reduction so it's softened the image a little so you want to do some pre sharpening or if you're using a camera which most cameras have an anti-aliasing filter on it that tends to soften the image as well so you're going to want to kind of bring back that sharpness so we'll do this now this application really consists of two sliders that do all the work first is the adaptive sharpening slider this is really the volume control when it's on zero you're not doing any sharpening at all to the image when it's all the way up to 100% you're applying sharpening 100% to the image and you can see as it renders its really getting sharp now so there's before and there's after now there's before and there's after now we have the second slider below it sharpen areas sharpen edges this if you go too far one way you'll have one problem if you go too far the other way you'll have a different problem specifically this defines how small of an area will be sharpened so if you have an image with a lot of my new to small detail you'd like to move this towards the right - to sharpen the edges a little more but if you move it too far to the right you may get haloing now I don't think this image has a area on it that would be haloed but what haloing is is if you have a dark object in front of a light object or vice versa a light object in front of a dark object that item that is in the foreground will tend to bleed or smear and that's haloing so like you have a dark telephone pole going up into the bright sky that is high contrast area and that telephone pole may smear or halo and the same thing vice versa if you had like a silver flagpole going up in front of very dark background of a backdrop of a fence or something it may smear so that's haloing and that will happen if you move this second slider too far to the right conversely if you go too far to the left towards sharpen areas this is for an image that doesn't have as much minut detail but what will happen is you'll enhance noise and you can see how the noise is really crazy now so you have to kind of pick the happy medium now there is a way you could deal with this if you can't really find that happy medium between these two sliders and you're still getting a lot of noise right below image quality by default you'll be on normal now this was only at ISO 200 so it really wasn't high ISO but if I click on high ISO you'll notice that it's not affecting the noise as much what it's not it's not really removing the noise it's just not applying the sharpening to that fine detail as much so it's kind of the fine detail beating being the noise so it's kind of reducing it so you could try to flip flock bet back between normal and high ISO to see if that helps as well now to properly sharpen the image I would zoom in like I did I would put sharpen areas somewhere in the middle where it was by default and then I would come in with this adaptive sharpening and I would start to move that to the right and then what I want to do is I want to move it to the right till I start to see the noise enhanced and you're gonna see the noise enhanced in this case most readily in the background so I'm gonna move it till I start to see some noise and I'm gonna back it up to that noise goes away then what I want to do is I want to take sharpen areas and I want to move that probably to the right if if I can't get rid of the noise I'd move it to or if I can't if I got haloing I'm sorry I'd move it to the left but I'll move it to the right and then I'll zoom out by double-clicking on the image and see what it looks like and then I could hit the preview checkbox here to see it before after zoom in again maybe it'll help see the before after takes a second to render there's before after before after so I could just play with these sliders until I'm happy with the sharpening now if I really want to get a lot of sharpening in the case of this penguins feathers and face and things and eyes and I want to really crank that up but I have some noise I'm starting to Hin Hance in the background I could put a negative control point on the background to help eliminate the noise back there because you're not really seeing the noise on the bird itself so what I could do is go where it's control points right here is I could click right here for the negative and add a negative control point to the background let's say right there now there's really only two sliders on the negative around either control point the first is the size of the control point I want to make it so it's not on the bird at all but it's on the background the second is the opacity this is the opacity of the sharpening if you're on 0 which it is now by default when you use the negative control point it's on zero we're not applying any sharpening to this point now to better demonstrate this I'm going to double click and zoom in there's our point right here to better demonstrate this I'm going to take sharpen areas and I'm gonna move it all the way to left so we get that noise again right but you'll notice where I put the control point if there's not noise in this lighter area now I want to duplicate the control point hold the alt or option key and alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac and pull it over another area right there now you can see it's really removing the noise it's an it's it's removing the sharpening actually from that point and you could see how it did it so it did pretty well right if I take this opacity slider though and move it to the right now we're letting the sharpening come through and we don't want that so we'll go this way so that's how you could further eliminate noise from very specific and selective parts of your image with these control points now what I do recommend you do is you could go up here in modes by default we'll be in sharpened image we're looking at our image right if you click that drop-down and you go to the effect mask wherever it's black we're room there's no sharpening going on wherever it's white we're getting maximum sharpening so now you could see how these work now you know it just gives you a better idea a better or idea where you're sharpening where you're not sharpening or where you're removing sharpening where you're actually a letting sharpening go through so we could go back to there now what I want to do though is I'm just gonna select those like that and I'm gonna go to delete and delete them for now and I'm gonna go more into control points in our next episode and color ranges in our next episode that's another way you could apply sharpening to selective areas of the image or remove sharpening to selective areas of the image but what I want to do is I really want to try to sharpen this image properly to demonstrate one more thing so just bear with me one second come up there okay okay that looks pretty good now you'll notice here that there's a slider it says applied to an entire image this is more or less an opacity slider right now the sharpening that I'm applying is being applied to every pixel equally if I start to bring this down it's just not applying the full amount of sharpening to all the pixels so if I come all the way down to zero we're not sharpening at all if I go to before after you won't see any difference here I'll zoom in there's before well let it render there's before-and-after so you don't see anything now if I go up to a hundred percent and I go before after for after so you could see particularly in the birds feathers up in here and on the birds cheek before after for after so you see that when this is at a hundred a hundred percent of the sharpening is being applied to the image now this isn't like a masking slider like you'd see in Lightroom where it starts to remove the sharpening from the background it's really affects every pixel equally and the best way to demonstrate that is go back to this modes drop-down and I go to the effect overlay and you'll see that it has red and it's evenly red it's red everywhere pretty much evenly and that means that we're sharpening evenly more or less a little bit less over in here for some reason but we're more or less evenly across the entire image as I start to bring it down you could see how it more or less is evenly removing the sharpening from the entire image Torat zero and it's not applying any sharpening at all so that is what that effect overlay does and that will help you further sharpen your image now when you're done and you're satisfied with your sharpening you go down here in the lower right hand corner and you click on save so it's actually going to apply these these the sharpening to that TIFF file that I created and we'll go back to Lightroom and our image will be next to our original image this is our original image that's our original raw file and if you look here there's the image now you might get this you'll notice in the top right hand corner of the little postage stamp down here that there's this little up arrow sometimes these adjustments that got done by any plugin you use the Lightroom doesn't really load them right away and you have to prompt Lightroom to do that so click on that and then go to import settings from disk right there so click there now they're applied so what I could do now is I could go to compare mode alright here's our TIF file this is our sharpened image I'll zoom in and here's our unsharpened image and if you most specifically look right up in here you can look here and you could see like looks almost like dandruff right on the birds fur or on the PERTs feathers I'm sorry and then here you can't see it as readily so there's pretty sharpening done you could see in the cheek - it's sharper as well you could drag around and look at the image and you can see how that pre sharpener worked now again with the pre sharpener you don't necessarily want to make it output sharp ready to share sharp this is just even here I probably over sharpened it a little bit too much you just want to bring back some of that sharpening you may have lost by your camera's anti-aliasing filter or by using a application either Lightroom or define or anything to remove noise and it's often the image then you use this raw pre sharpener to bring that sharpness back now I would go in and I would start I go to the develop module and I'd start processing this image the way I want it and then I may choose to do some sharpening in a creative way that's step two right creative sharpening or I may skip that and just go to output sharpening when I'm ready to print or share the image now in our next episode I'm gonna go I'm going to demonstrate how to use sharpener Pro 3 raw pre sharpening as a Photoshop plug-in and I'm going to show some of those other features we haven't covered in the application and we're going to cover that in that video then we'll be done with sharper Pro 3 raw pre sharpening and then we're going to finish up this entire series by covering sharpener Pro 3 output sharpening you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 9,423

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, sharpen, sharp images, sharpening image, RAW processing

Id: X8roUhiH6sg

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2019