Mastering the Nik Collection - 24: Output Sharpener

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 hey guys this is the last video on the Nik collection and you thought it would never end in this video I'm gonna cover sharpener Pro 3 output sharpener now I'm only doing one video on the output sharpener because quite frankly it's the least popular of all the modules in the Nik collection it's not one that most people use although it is very powerful now we're going to be processing this image in the output sharpener this is just a straight raw file from a Nikon camera and I didn't do anything unusual to it just really basic processing I didn't even add any clarity to it and as a matter of fact I didn't add any sharpening at all no luminance noise reduction there is some color noise reduction added to it so we're gonna do all our sharpening in the output sharpener as a matter of fact I didn't even crop this so this is really just pretty much a straight raw shot with a little basic processing now the sharpener Pro 3 output sharpener is one of the modules in Nick that will only work as a plugin it does not work as a standalone product and as you can see we're going to use it as a Lightroom plugin you could also use it as a photoshop plugin now from within Lightroom when you want to send an image into sharpener Pro 3 I'll put sharpener the easiest way in my opinion is just to right-click right on the image then go down to edit in and then down to sharpen or pro 3 output sharpener now as I mentioned many times Nick does not work directly on RAW files so when you have a raw file you're going to have to convert it to either a tiff PSD or a JPEG I recommend you use at F it seems to be the fastest of the three file formats PSD is a little slower and sometimes I found my computer to lock up and JPEG just doesn't have all the color depth and tonal depth that the other two would have so I suggest you go with TIFF and I've mentioned many times about color space there's four color space cells available on my computer depending on your system you may not have display p3 showing of prophoto RGB is the largest color space that has the most colors our Doby RGB is next display p3 is next in the smallest color space is srgb most monitors could reproduce around 98% of the sRGB color space but they really can't produce a lot of the other color spaces although if you buy a really expensive Adobe RGB monitor it should produce most of those colors in that color space so the color space you use really depends on whether or not you're going to be printing your image if you're going to be printed printing your image a printer especially a high quality printer will be able to produce a lot more colors than your monitor well so you like to probably pick either Adobe RGB or prophoto RGB in this case I'm just gonna leave it at srgb for this demonstration bit-depth the 16-bit scan per component is what I recommend it gives you the most colors our resolution the lowest I recommend you go is 240 and that's the default value here most people put 300 a year and that works well if you have an Epson printer epson recommends that you put 360 here and since I have an Epson printer we'll put that there and then when you're ready you just click Edit now Lightroom is going to create this TIFF file you can see the progress bar in the top left-hand corner once the TIFF file is created the file will open up directly in - sharpener Pro 3 I'll push our parent it's pretty much the typical NIC workspace there are no presets or at least no in the Box presets for the output sharpener although if you find that your sharpening the image the same way all the time all your images you use the same type of sharpening you could create your own preset so to save time but there's nothing out of the box now all the actions over here on the right-hand panel and it really is governed by what your sharpening the image for in this drop-down you'll see right now it says display so we're sharpening the image to be displayed on a computer monitor below that you can see there's inkjet if you're going to get the image sharp if you're sharpening the image to be printed on an inkjet printer you would pick this trace and you'll notice when you do the controls or the features change down here compared to display display had a single slider inkjet has three different dropdowns below inkjet is continuous tone continuous tone is really something that would have unlimited colors unlimited illuminance levels so like a super-high-end printer that most of us can't afford maybe even like a super-high-end monitor i mean like our you know really like television screen monitor that super super high-tech would have unlimited color and luminance levels something like that halftone is black and white so if you're processing a black and white image you would pick halftone a hybrid device probably most of us wouldn't do anything like that either that would be like offset printing printing a book things like that so most of us probably are just going to use display or inkjet and sometimes halftone now I'm gonna stay with display for now just to show you what to do with the display type sharpening situation now really you'll see it just has this one slider and it has it's called adaptive sharpening and quite obviously if you move it to the right it will increase the sharpness and if you move it to left it will decrease sharpness now I'm probably guessing that on your watching this video at least on your screen you didn't really see a lot happen so what I'm going to do is in post-production of my video I'm gonna zoom in right here on the feathers right here now we're at adaptive sharpening at zero now I'll bring adaptive sharpening to 100 and once it kicks in you'll see how much more sharp it is so adaptive sharpening for display is relatively subtle it's not overwhelming but there are some creative sharpening options below that and this is where you could really tweak this sharpening to be more your style or at least to make the image the way you want it to look first is the output sharpening strength so as I move that to the right you'll notice once it kicks in it makes it even sharper okay so we'll go all the way to zero and again I'll zoom in right here okay and then we'll go all the way to a 200% and you can see that it made it a lot sharper compared to its default position of a hundred percent structure will really affect the image and it will make it look bad usually if you go too far either way so if we take structure up you'll notice after it kicks in it really overwhelms the image it actually brought out the noise a lot more so of course that's at a hundred percent again then if you brought structure all the way down to minus one hundred percent it goes the other way it really blurs it out so structure is something you want to use very sparingly because it really does and can it vary adversely affect your image now local contrast in my opinion is a great slider if you're sharpening feathers or fur so this slider works well with the Eagle as I move this to the right it just adds that sharpening that really brings out the feathers our fur now at 99% or 100% that's really too much of course if you bring it down you'll kind of blur it a lot so you don't want to do that so with local contrast again similar to structure you don't want to go too far with it you don't add a little bit here a little bit there now focus it unfortunately will not repair or correct an out-of-focus image it just really kind of makes everything a little sharper or a little blurry err depending on which way you move it if you move it to the right you'll see things get a little sharper it's a little more subtle than the other three if you move it to the left that will be a little more obvious see how it added blur to the image so focus - you could move that around and again I would recommend using or moving any of these four sliders rather sparingly you don't want to go too far on any of them now the selective sharpening below that is where it gets a little confusing a lot of people don't really because they're used to control points and what's the other way I always forget the name color ranges they're used to control points and color ranges and other knick plugins then when they come in here they think it should work the same way and it really doesn't generally speaking you would come up here and do the universal adjustments first so you're affecting every pixel in the image and for this demonstration I'll take structure all the way up once you do the universal adjustments then you could determine whether one part of the image needs more sharpening and another part of the image needs less sharpening and that's when you do the selective sharpening adjustments and to begin with I'm going to go to color ranges because it's a little more obvious when I do it now you'll remember in our video on the raw pre sharpener I use color ranges and how effective it was and the way you would typically use it is you would click on the dropper you know you can click directly on the color swatch and get a color picker and pick your color here but it's much easier to just pick click on the eyedropper then your cursor turns into the eyedropper and you can pick a color and I'll pick white alright so we picked white and you notice nothing really happened well if I come in here now with this output sharpener strength right now it's at a hundred percent if I move it down to zero percent you probably noticed the white got less sharp let's put it back to a hundred and maybe even to better show this I'll bring it up to 200% and let it kick in okay now the white is being sharpened now I'm gonna quickly move it down to zero and once it kicks in now you could see how it's just affecting the white so really the idea here is that you would use the sliders up top to dial in the sharpness in a very general way across the entire image then you would use in this case color ranges to either add more sharpening to a color or take some of the sharpening away from the color so in this case that was white right then I could click this eyedropper and do the iris of the Eagle 4 there and then I could click this dropper and do the beak now if you wanted to add more colors you would click this plus slider or plus button right there and now we could add another color I'll pick like the background so we could take the background all the way down we could sharpen the beak more we could sharpen the iris more and we could bring the fur down so something like that now again I don't because there's this acceptable I did it for demonstration purposes by bringing structure all the way up now similarly why don't we actually and I just get rid of all these put that back it a hundred put that back in a hundred and let's jump over to the control points you'll notice that the control point doesn't have a plus or minus on it because like the color ranges you use the control points to either add a little more sharpening or take away some of the sharpening so when you click on it and add a control point I'll add it to the FIR again the white fur the Eagle we add the control point there you could see right away it kind of took away that sharpening and you'll see there's only the two sliders the sharpening strength you can move it up to add the sharpen and it's not actually doing it or you could take it down the other way up now I'm not sure why it's doing that but the idea is again there there I think it's a little better there we go up let it kick in and so it's got sharp and then I could bring it down and kind of blur it out so the idea again is you either add a little sharpening or take away a little sharpening and it's not affecting all the other colors and those of you that have watched my previous videos where ever you drop that point it's looking at tone texture and color and anywhere within this circle of influence it's going to try to just affect that same tone texture and color so even though the eye and part of the beak is within this area of influence it shouldn't be affected as much as the feathers are and if you want to see what is affected you may have noticed before I just click this little checkbox right there and you get this kind of black and white version wherever it's white is where this is being or the control point is affecting wherever it's black it's not affecting it at all and where it's gray it's affecting it a little bit so we could take that off so it's the same idea you could then duplicate this control point by holding in the alt or option key alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac let's say move it over mr. Eagles I bring that way down and we want the eye real sharp right so we could bring that up you can bring one on the beak hold the alt or option key and again and similarly do all that with this now I'm going to get rid of all the control points so I'm gonna click on one hold the shift key egg down and click on the last one and then click on delete to get rid of all those yes I want to get rid of them and we'll go back up to the top and I'll show you some more details let's reset this all and to reset a slider actually just double click right on the slider itself and it will put it back to its kind of default position and we'll go up here and we'll go to inkjet now now we have a lot of different choices for inkjet first of all is the viewing distance by default to be on auto that's kind of a general setting for the viewing distance but if you want to be very specific if you think you're going to be printing a large print that's going to be hanging a wall and people are gonna be three meters away you could go to the drop-down and you could go to one point eight so three meters right here so this is the distance someone will be and you can see as I did it it sharpened it a little more if I go up and I go to up to sixty centimeters so someone's gonna be really close to it you can see it's not as sharp it's not adding as much sharpness so when someone's really close to the image it doesn't need to be as sharp as is if someone's further away from the image so you can go over three meters and you can see how it really sharpened the image quite a bit now the type of paper texture fine our paper canvas paper not much difference there plain paper I think you might see a difference when I get too glossy there's matte lustre and maybe glossy really not much of a difference there the printer resolution so by default it's unlike the lowest resolution but as you get up to a higher printer up resolution up here you'll notice the sharpening isn't as intense so you would you don't find out what the resolution is of your printer and dial it in here and then what type of paper you're printing to and how far away you think someone is going to be and those are just three controls you have for the inkjet printer then after that of course you still have the ability to affect the output strength a little more with this slider one way or the other you could add structure to the image with that slider same thing feathers in fur with this one the local contrast focus and proof focus or blur it slightly with that one and the same thing with the control points and the color ranges and you could get a control point like put it on the white fur again and then you could add more sharpening or take away some of the sharpening you can see it's working more more like I expected it to work from before so the control point there and we could delete that one now you know those are the main things I mentioned below that I don't think he'd use continuous-tone munch you may use black and white and very similarly you have the viewing distance again then what type of paper is it going to be newsprint an uncoated paper a coated paper or high gloss paper and then the printer resolution is a slider this time so you could just dial in what the resolution is of your printer with that slider now I want to just temporarily jump back to inkjet over here on the top left you have some choices in this drop-down you have a soft proof option and it's different than the soft proof that is in Lightroom soft proofing and Lightroom shows you colors that are out of range that your printer probably is going to reproduce properly or your monitor isn't going to reproduce properly all this soft proofing does it kind of gives you an idea what the sharpening is going to look like at the distance you specified meaning if I go to soft proof right now you'll see that it made the image really small so that it gives you an idea what the sharpening looks like but if I go to viewing distance now and I go to up to 60 centimeters so someone's going to be really really close to the image right now right so that's it it kind of zooms it in so we get an idea what that will look like conversely if I go to the other end three meters away you see how it's really small now there you go somewhere in the middle so that's what soft proofing does it kind of just reproduces the distance it thinks your viewer will be from the image so you could get get a better idea what the sharpening will look like and that's really all it is when you want to go back to the sharpen image you could just click right there and now we have the real the normal view per se and below that we have the effect overlay and this is similar to to what the other you know effect overlay and effect masks were in previous modules I covered and I think to do this what I'm going to do very quickly is I'm going to do some color ranges I have those oh and another one here that is this was the B coupe stand like that sorry go the drop dropper right there and I'll turn those way up and we'll go to display and I'll turn that up and that up just so we could see the sharpening more readily okay so we have the structure up okay now when we go to the effect overlay what you'll see here now when I take this white and move it down all the way down you can see as it's kind of taking the red away in a light allowing some light to come through where it's white it's not being sharpened where the red is that's being sharpened so that gives you an idea what you're actually sharpening similarly with the eye and it's affecting the beak as well as you could see because of course they're very similar color and there's that one as well so you can see as I move it down as it gets brighter it's not being sharpened as much as the more saturated or darker red comes through so that gives you what the effect overlay does below that is the effect mask and this is similar when it's all white that means everything's getting sharpened as I bring it down and we start to get that black come through the black is not being sharpened so this could give you even a better idea what you're sharpening and what you're not sharpening right now the entire background is being sharpened a lot of the bird is being sharpened but a lot isn't - so where it's black it's not being sharpened at all and where it's gray it's being sharpened a little bit there you go back to that so we got this kind of overdone image then preview right here could give you a before-and-after you also have some different views you have this slider and then you have us like a side-by-side or 101 over the other view the click there T to the side-by-side now to like if I really wanted to sharpen this what I would probably do is bring this down bring this down let's see let's see if I want to actually sharpen this image I would bring those back up let's see let's see where I stand it's before and there's after okay we're going to bring a depth of sharpening way up and then we're going to bring sharpening strength up a little bit I'm going to bring local contrast up a little bit I want the eye looks pretty good upping that up a little more now with color ranges I either could take the sharpening away a little bit or add a little more I'm gonna add a little more on there I think that looks good let's say that's that's done in it's a little over sharpen bring that down a little bit that's a little better ok so we'll click Save and what it will do will apply those adjustments we just did to the TIFF file and we'll open up in Lightroom again right here and when we open the film strip down here so this is our TIFF file and there's the original raw file so there's the tiff sharpened there's the raw file not sure TIFF sharpened profile unsharpened so gives you an idea of how to use sharpener pro3 output sharpener as I mentioned at the top it's probably not the most popular module in the Nik collection it is very effective as you could see no I should add that if you're sending your image off to a lab a professional lab particularly I should add if you're sending your image off to a professional lab to be printed you really don't have to worry about output sharpening they're going to sharpen your image and you could check with your lab make sure but they're going to sharpen your image in most cases to the type of paper they're going to be using so if you're getting a canvas done and you send them a JPEG they're going to sharpen your JPEG appropriately for that canvas on the other hand if you're getting printed on glossy paper they'll sharpen it properly for the glossy paper they're using so they they'll sharpen your image for you the output sharpener mainly is if you're only if you're going to be sharing your images online and people are going to be looking at them on a computer monitor or if you're going to print them yourself other than that you really don't have to worry about it as much the the professional lab will take care of the sharpening so that's it for the Nik collection just at the end here I just want to thank everyone who stayed with me throughout this whole series I really do appreciate it all my videos are free there will always be free in the link in the description below this video there'll be a link there's ways you could help some ways won't even cost you any money even if you could just like and share the video that helps I really do appreciate it so thank you everyone I really do appreciate everything you do for me you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 10,072

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

Id: bCpE67d4Z4U

Length: 27min 50sec (1670 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019