New to DxO_Is there a good tutorial for sharpening in DxO 3 without needing to purchase the Nik Collection or other add-ons?
Use the sharpening tools that are already in PhotoLab 3 - lens sharpening or unsharp mask plus highlight/midtone/shadow contrast should al help.
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Thanks, this was very helpful. I thought there would be more to it. In Adobe Camera RAW there are some visual tricks to aid you to avoid over sharpening. It appears the Lens Correction Tool is tweaked to sharpen specifically where the lens is soft. That’s great!
Hi Joanna. I’m aware of those tools but thought there might be a tutorial that would be a guide as to not over sharpen images.
The best guide is your own eyes 
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I believe you just came from lightroom. Well just forget those silly rulls of Noise reduction vs. sharpening in LR.
Here in PL N.R. Does what it has to do. Sharpening does what it has to do…
Don’t worry using each one of them separately as per the photo itself.
Those days in LR I always knew I had to keep the sum of those sliders equal to 100.
Wellcom to new life. DXO does any adjustments the way it should work. Just easy as it is…
@GARoss
Hello George,
mabe this one helps https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/technique/photo_editing/how-to-reduce-noise-dxo-photolab-2-132618
It’s for PL2, but the basics I think are the same.
An quick overview by DXO you will find here https://www.dxo.com/dxo-photolab/prime-denoising-technology/
Best regards
Guenter
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Actually, Photoshop CS6 Ex but same is the same. I tried Lightroom years ago & hated it.
You can really get carried away with Adobe Camera RAW & not necessarily in a good way. DxO leaves very little to do unless you’re looking for creative HDR effects, etc.
So far, so good!
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Joanna says: “The best guide is your own eyes”
Well, maybe. But be aware that sharpening on screen is not an exact representation of how your output will look. With DXO PL, sharpening is only visible at 80% magnification or higher - this is important to know and has been the subject of many questions on this forum over the years. Even at 80% on screen, for most images this would be a huge print, and at 100% my monitor (Dell 1920x1200, 24" screen) is just over 100 pixels per inch, which with an image 4800 px high would equate to a 48 inch high print, much bigger than many people would ever print (at 300 dpi, you would print a 16" high print)… Making an image “look sharp” on screen often translates into an over-sharpened print. Often if you just leave sharpening settings at default, an A3 print will usually look perfectly sharp. If you print from another software package, be aware that may also add a sharpening step by default - check and if necessary turn it off. PL already has very good “lens sharpening” applied in the RAW conversion stage. Another issue with PL is that if you use Unsharp Masking, as far as I can tell there is no way of masking the sharpening effect, so it is applied to everything, including noise/grain in smooth areas such as sky. In LR or ACR I routinely mask (usually to about 90%) when applying sharpening, so that only edges and significant detail are sharpened, this helps a lot with controlling noise in images, and can help avoid edge artefacts. I’ve shown this to several people, some hardened professionals using LR/ACR every day, who had no idea this function even existed.
So I would suggest yes, be guided by your eyes - but by looking at a print, not the monitor. And understand how sharpening is applied.
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In the NIK Output sharpener it’s possible to choose an Output media, define own Output settings and use the “selektive Schärfe” with Control points.
So in my free Google Nik Collection
Maybe this helps
Hi, I asked the same question a while back & got some very interesting & valuable answers.
Here’s the link to that topic too:
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