ProSharpener

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We buy expensive cameras and lenses to get sharp and high resolution photos. The problem comes when we share these photos online. Uploaded photos on the Web are resized. For example, Instagram resizes photos at just 1 megapixel!

Relative comparison of 42, 24, and 1 megapixel photo. Note that megapixels measure the area, so doubling the amount of megapixels will increase width and height, but these will not double as well.

No matter how sharp is the original photo, such small images will only look sharp by properly sharpening them after resize.

In fact, sharpening the original full resolution file doesn’t make much sense. For example, a sharpened 42MP photo will lose all details when it is resized to be shown on Instagram at 1MP.

That’s why sharpening is so tedious. It must be done considering the resolution you want to display the photo. Here is why ProSharpener comes in handy.

What is ProSharpener

It is tedious to prepare a photo to be exported for the Web or for social media such as Instagram. The photo has to be resized to the required resolution, sharpened, and converted to the correct color profile and bit depth. Too much has to be done, and way too many times we do some mistakes.

ProSharpener is a plugin for Photoshop to sharpen, resize, and execute many other operations in your photos. All you need needed to get accurate sharpening, wether you are exporting the photo for the Web or exporting the photo for printing!

ProSharpener Features

Presets

Available presets already suggest the best options to sharpen and export your photos.  We tested for months with our ambassadors refining our algorithms for the best possible results!

Resize for Web

It is possible to resize by width, by height, or resize by short or long edge. With these options it is easy to follow social media and websites upload guidelines.

Sharpening Amount

 The amount of sharpening can be set depending on your style and type of photo.  Extra sharpening layer can be created to highlight important parts of the photo.

Edge Mask

 Excessive sharpening and resize can create halos in high contrast areas, usually in the transition between foreground and sky.  Edge mask automacially protect these areas.

Sharpening Separation 

 Sharpening works by darkening and lightening edges in order to create micro-contrast.  Sharpening separation will separate sharpening in two different layers so you can decide the amount.

Compensation

 Depending on your settings, excessive sharpening and resize can cause minimal loss of saturation or contrast. You can compensate using these settings.

Color Conversion

 Posting photos without properly color conversion will cause the image to have different colors on Instagram, Facebook or your website.  ProSharpener will do the conversion for you, in the right way.

Create a copy !

 To make sure you work on copies of the files, so you don’t overwrite by mistake your originals full resolution photos.

ProSharpener documentation

Sharpening Theory

To explain how sharpening works, let’s use a photo of the stars to explain how sharpening works:

How is ProSharpener (or any other software) be able to sharpen such a small resolution image? The technique is simple (at least in words): increase contrast on the edges.

To demonstrate this let’s zoom in to 600% of the original image just to look what’s happening in the stars. You can notice that around each star a dark border is created, and stars are brightened up as well. In other words: edge contrast is increased.

While this might look strange when you zoom in 600%, this creates a very good illusion of sharpness when you look the whole photo.

But, for the same reason, be aware that sharpening depends on the resolution it was applied. For example, a sharpened 42MP photo will lose all details when it is resized to be shown on Instagram at 1MP.

That’s why sharpening is so tedious. It must be done considering the resolution you want to display the photo.

ProSharpener instead offers you a way to quickly and automatically prepare the photo for a specific resolution, wether you want to print it, export it for your website, or to export it for Instagram.

Why can’t Photoshop do this?

Photoshop offers two methods to export photos for Web or social media. You can either use Export as… or Save for Web…

These two allows you to resize the photo to the correct resolution. For example, for Instagram you would resize to have a width of 1080px.

Despite that, neither of these include sharpening.

As explained in the Sharpening Theory section in this page, sharpening should be done after the resize, while with these two export methods in Photoshop you can only sharpen only before.

So the only other possibility using Photoshop is to create a copy of the current document, to flatten all levels and to resize. After that to apply any sharpening methods you know, and finally to use Export as… or Save for Web…

Doesn’t it sound tedious and error prone?