With all of the photo purchases that I need to make, I want to spend my money wisely. I mean I need to upgrade to CS3, I just bought a 40D and next will be the grip and so on and so on. (You know how it goes!) And I have read a lot of praises for Photokit Sharpener and am considering purchasing this as well. My concern is that Lightroom is going to come out with better output sharpening and then I may end up having spent $100 for PK when I did not need to.
Thanks for any input and advice you can provide.
Regards,
Pat
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I might be different from a lot of folks here but although I used to like PKS (and still do) I've quit using it. I find that the 'capture' sharpening in LR coupled with the fairly crude print sharpening works decently for small prints. So in this case I can often avoid a round trip to PS, PKS and back to print.
When I print large, and I often do, I've run into some issues. Doing this I've exported the image from LR to PS, uprezzed in size to the final print output and then applied PKS output sharpening. It is after this that I have a major problem. Now I cannot (often) bring that print back into LR as it exceeds the LR size limitation. I don't like printing from PS for a number of reasons and was much happier doing this either from LR of Qimage. So I ran a few tests and found that for much of what I was doing the PS uprezzed file, sharpened with PKS and printed was in fact an inferior print than the same file, retained in LR and then upressed 'on the fly' and smart sharpened as it was printed by Qimage. To top it off it meant I didn't have to round trip to PS and it save a ton of disk space as I keep the final print images as well!
So at the end of the day I've found that I no longer use/need PKS. Small prints are capture sharpened in LR and then printed from LR. Large prints are capture sharpened in LR and then 'edited' from LR in Qimage (you can set up Qimage as a secondary program for editing from LR) and printed from the original image. Qimage upresses appropriately for the printer driver and smart sharpens on the fly - it does a tremendous job from my perspective.