Sharpening with GOOGLE NIK EFEX

Google Nik has to be one of the best suites of plugins for Lightroom and Photoshop available. Many of our McFade Training customers use it, so in this mini series, we’ll introduce the workflow NIK recommend, showing you how we’d use it on a Landscape photo of the lake district.

The photo at the head of the page is a close up of a brocade waistcoat and pocket watch. The left is the RAW file opened in NIK EFEX with no sharpening, the right is the sharpened effect that the Pre Sharpener creates.

The Google Nik EFEX Workflow

Nik EFEX suggest you use the filters in the following order :-

1. RAW Pre Sharpen
2. Dfine noise reduction
3. Viveza for brightness, saturation and contrast

These 3 steps can be performed on any image as preparation for one of the advanced creative filters:-

1. Silver EFEX – the best black and white plugin available, simulating old black and white film, and much more
2. Colour EFEX – a suite of creative filters which enhance colour, detail and quickly give powerful images
3. Analog EFEX – simulate vintage, toy, wet plate and multi-exposure cameras with this creative photographer’s dream plugin.

Then when you have finished – there is an “output sharpener”, which has lots of presets for all your print and display needs.

Step 1 – The Sharpener

All RAW processing programs have sharpeners, lightroom and capture one have powerful options, this plugin step replaces the need to sharpen in software.

Why Bother? Well some times I’ve seen Lightroom sharpening create strange “powdered” effects around edges, a grainy feel between edges. That seems to be more controllable in RAW Pre Sharpener. You can certainly over-do the effect, but in general, it’s great at pulling detail out of flat scenes.

In this short video, we show you

• How to open the NIK EFEX Sharpener from Lightroom
• A quick overview of the NIK EFEX window and some short cuts
• The 2 sliders – it is pretty simple!

Next… DeFine

Coming next – zap that noise with NIK EFEX DeFine!