What Program Do You Use For Unsharp Masking?

[QT Luong]

If you have time to use Photoshop's USM *carefully* and to make your own comparisons of the effects of various settings on the final print, there isn't any benefit of using pluggins. On the other hand, using them would save you time in a production environment. Sure, you can put together yourself an action for, let say, edge-aware sharpening, but will you do a better job than professional software writers in the one hour that $50 is worth ?

[Glenn Kroeger]

I really like PhotoKit Pro. It lets me do "creative" sharpening but I find the real advantage are the excellent tuned results it produces for different types of printers (inkjets at different dpi and continuous tone such as Chromira). Well worth $99.

[QT Luong]

Sorry, forgot to answer the original question: I use PK Sharpener as well as the PS filter directly.

[Ben Hopson]

Scott, I usually use Photoshop's USM along with the High Pass filter on a seperate layer with either a Soft Light or Hard Light blending mode. Results in good sharpening and easily controlled with layer opacity and the amount of High Pass used.

I did also download and try the Photo Kit Sharpener and was able to get very good results from it as well.

[Henry Ambrose]

Scott, I'd go with what Frank and Danny said. Learn Photoshop and do your work there. Save your money. I doubt that any USM or sharepen add on filter is worth the money. They don't do anything that you can't do in PS. If speed is a real issue, set up actions for complicated tasks you run often and use the F buttons to access them and your often used filters and commands. Once you learn PS well you will be lots faster than you are now. Remember that if you work in layers or simply work on a copy of your original file you can always go back, so jump in and master PS as much as you can or need to get your work done.

[Jeffrey Sipress]

Danny, Until you actually use Fred's Intellisharpen II, you don't know the controls that it gives you. And it's fast. And it's a real bargain.

[Peter Langham]

I use photo kit sharpener. It was developed by Bruse Fraser, who has written he worked on 5000 images to develop it. And he was one of the leading experts before he started. His articles, cited above, explain the theroy well, but I don't know if I can match his experience. Anyway, my pictures seem to come out just right without having to worry much. It can get bogged down on large files, so be patient. I think you can try it free for a week.
Even if you don't use the software, you might want to consider a multiple pass sharpening routine.

Peter

[David F. Stein]

Ultrasharpen. CHEAP AND GREAT. And the Fraser and Deadman ones mentioned.

[Scott Rosenberg]

hey fellas, thanks for all the insightful responses. just a little on me, though i probably should have mentioned this stuff in my original query, i have been using photoshop for about ten years now and am pretty good with the software. i fully understand the usm tool and am quite capable with it. however, when reading such positive reviews from experts such as Vincent Oliver and Michael Reimann, I wondered if there's some benefit to using the dedicated usm apps over the simple one in photoshop. sounds like it might be worth a try.

thanks agian,
scott

[Donald Qualls]

Working on a tight budget can cause you to trade off time for money. I use the unsharp mask filter in the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). It won't work on 16 bits per channel images, but neither will anything in the copy of Photoshop 5 LE that came with my (old) scanner. I scan at 16 bits, adjust levels in PS5LE, demote to 8 bits, spot with the clone tool in PS5LE, then do resizing, sharpening if any, and JPG export in GIMP (GIMP gives me much more direct and precise control of file size in the JPG export than PS5LE). The 8 bit file, after level adjustment, is saved as an uncompressed TIFF (uncompressed because the GIMP won't read the only compression scheme PS5LE will write inTIFF).

I've had a few large prints made from files significantly cropped from 9x12 cm, and been quite happy with the results (20-30 MB JPG files), and my web sized images look as good as an image that size can -- so I'm happy with the process.