Reviews

Photoshop Online Reviews, Jan. 2006
Review of Sharpness Editor: Photoshop User Rating 4 out of 5 stars. "An outstanding collection of filters. Unique photo-sharpening plugin" - Dave Huss. See the full review here (The last star missing was because of a poor tutorial. This has been remedied).

Digital Camera Magazine May 2004.
"This filter is superb and delivers everything it promises... Amazing value. 95% VALUE.
See the review here.

Benefits
of the plugin

Sharpen images without the defects of other sharpeners: negative contours.
Sharpen images with no noise enhancement.
Three original sharpening methods based on optical parameters.
True optical blur of defocus.
Selective sharpening - restrict to edges, color or value.
Anti-alias otherwise jagged edges.

The Sharpness Editor plugin filter works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, Grayscale, Duotone, CMYK, Multichannel, Lab.

Sharpness Editor
filter controls

This is the Sharpness Editor plug-ins control panel at one fourth size. Click on the photo or the links to see the plug-in at full size. The filter has these sets of controls:

1. Sharpen method
2. Anti-aliasing
3. Edges only
4. Brightness range
5. Color-range
6. Memory

Example

The Sharpness Editor plugin is the only sharpener on the market that can sharpen without creating negative edge lines. Since we released this, several copies have emerged, but they don't work

Sharpness Editor Tests

A number of tests have been done. Of these a processing speed test and two performance tests will be of general interest.

Test - Processing Speed

Sharpness Editor has two quality modes: High and Extra high. The difference in performance speed becomes more pronounced as blur size grows. Highest quality is optically perfect. Normal quality allows for some irregularities at pixel level.

The method Sharpness Editor is faster than Gentle Unsharp Mask.
Blur size is the only major time factor. All other sliders make either no or very little change on the speed.

Speed test

The following two computers - win and mac - performed identically in the test below.
WIN: 1.4 GHz AMD Athlon w. 384 MB Ram, Win 98; Photoshop 6.0.
MAC: 400MHz G4; 320 MB Ram, VM off; MacOS 9.2.2; Photoshop 6.0.

Processing time in seconds - v. 6

Tests - Sharpness Editor vs. regular Unsharp Mask

Two tests

Two tests were performed. The first to see how edges are treated and determine to what degree specular edge phenomena are generated. The second to show how single-pixel variations on a low level are treated and determine the degree such low level variations have their contrast altered so they end up standing out as noise instead of integrated variation of a monochrome hue.

It was found that...

1. Sharpness Editor does produce minor edge phenomena at Fix Edge settings below 80%. At 80% and above they are eliminated.
2. Fix Edges also handles unwanted enhancement of small pixel variations so they don't appear as speckled noise. Also 80% seems to be the borderline setting.
3. From both tests combined it appears that Photoshop's Unsharp Mask has detrimental side effects no matter how low or gentle the settings.
4. Photoshop's rescaling of the unsharp mask effect to 0-500% instead of the actual 0-100% is sound in the sense that the detrimental side effects of regular unsharp mask become too apparent above 100% to be disguised by the already present pixel variations.

Test 1- Contour & Edgeline Artifacts

Test for edge phenomena

The original image above was blurred with a gaussian blur (to be fair) at radius 0.5. We then tested to see if the image could be sharpened without leaving any traces of edge-artifacts. All the images have been enlarged 800% for the sake of clarity.

Observe there are no negative edge lines produced with Power retouche.

Test 2: Pixel level contrast alterations

It was found that neither sharpener could regenerate lost texture on a single pixel level of low contrast variations.

Regular unsharp mask produced a marked effect of contrast exaggeration rendering the surface structure as noise.

Sharpness Editor performs best with the Fix Edges less than 100% when it comes to regenerating surface texture.