Sharpening -- 3 Different Methods?

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2020-12-21 02:24:58

Hi. In Pixelmator Pro there seems to be 3 different ways to access a sharpen tool:

1. In Effects (where I can choose between Sharpening and Sharpen Luminance)

2. In Color Adjustments

3. In Tools Retouch, where I can choose to sharpen certain areas and can also select shadows, midtones, or highlights.

In which situation should I use which tool? Your online help doesn't seem to help differentiate (it does give me good instructions on each one--just no big picture).

I did find that the Toole Retouch won't work on a RAW image, but clearly has the most flexibility.

Can someone help me with this or direct me to a relevant article?

Thank you.
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2020-12-22 10:53:11

Hi Danny! The Sharpen tools in the Effects and Color Adjustments are more or less the same, we simply added them to both tools because, while it is primarily a photo editing feature, we wanted easy access to it when creating effect presets. But for the most part, each one is a tool that sharpens the entire image nondestructively and, therefore, works on all types of layers, including RAW layers.

As for the difference between Sharpen and Sharpen Luminance – sharpening works by increasing the contrast of edge areas. Increasing contrast in the classic image editing way will also increase saturation, i.e. the perceived intensity of colors. The reason for that is a brighter color will appear to be more intense. Sharpen Luminance tries to get around this by increasing contrast without affecting perceived saturation.

The Sharpen tool is a retouching tool designed to be used locally, i.e. on specific areas in an image. This is a destructive tool and rather than acting as a 'filter', it affects pixels directly. For that reason, it only works on raster (i.e. image) layers and will not work on shape/text/RAW layers.
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2020-12-23 17:54:16

That's really helpful Andrius. And there should be more of that kind of explanation your online documentation. To mee the documentation, while well-written, is too focused on individual features. That's fine if you know what you're looking for but for something like learning PP it doesn't help much.

One more suggestion-- if the Sharpen tools in the Effects and Color Adjustments are the same then why not offer both sharpen and sharpen luminance functions in both places?
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2021-01-04 16:50:03

by Danny Sands 2020-12-23 15:54:16 That's really helpful Andrius. And there should be more of that kind of explanation your online documentation. To mee the documentation, while well-written, is too focused on individual features. That's fine if you know what you're looking for but for something like learning PP it doesn't help much.
The current documentation is like that by design – a user guide designed to be read front to back would be nice, though it's a big undertaking both in terms of the initial work and keeping it up to date. Not saying that we won't get around to it, but there are some other major improvements coming to Pixelmator Pro that I think will enhance and improve the workflow quite significantly, so it would at least be nice to add those first before working on an in-depth guide.
by Danny Sands 2020-12-23 15:54:16 One more suggestion-- if the Sharpen tools in the Effects and Color Adjustments are the same then why not offer both sharpen and sharpen luminance functions in both places?
I believe this is mostly to keep the UI simpler and less cluttered. Though I could be wrong...