Photoshop How To

All photographers strive for sharp images, and we often employ a variety of methods to rehabilitate shots that are slightly soft due to camera shake, slow shutter speeds, or when we didn’t nail focus precisely. While there are a variety of ways to get the job done, Google’s free Sharpener Pro 3 is one of the best as you’ll see in the tutorial below.

Sharpener Pro 3 is part of the very popular free NIK Collection editing suite. Back in June Google announced, “We have no plans to update the Collection or add new features over time,” but until future Photoshop, Lightroom or system updates render the Nik Collection incompatible, Sharpener Pro 3 and other components of the free suite remain very powerful tools.

The video below from Mango Street demonstrates everything you need to know about using Sharpener Pro 3 to fix soft images, but it’s important to remember that as with any sharpening tool it’s easy to go overboard and destroy an image if you get carried away. Our suggestion is to sharpen a photo until you think it looks greet, then back off a bit so you’ll end up with an image that still appears natural.

You can download Google’s free Nik Collection here. We encourage you read this discussion about Google’s decision to stop supporting the Nik suite by our columnist Scott Kelby, and an earlier story we posted with a warning about destroying images with excessive sharpening.