MASTER unshar p MASK

It sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s the way to sharpen, Rod Lawton explains

TIFF or JPEG version of your photo; the original file is never modified.

Creative control

The fact that the editing is nondestructive is useful because you may need to apply different sharpening settings in different situations. You can apply ‘capture’ sharpening to all your photos to make them crisper, but you may also want to apply ‘output’ sharpening to optimise prints or images which are going to be displayed on-screen. The level of output sharpening needed will depend on the printing/display technology, and the size of the print or screen image, so the ability to change the settings each time you export an image is a big advantage. You can save different sharpening presets for different jobs.

Capture NX-D’s Unsharp Mask panel also has a Radius slider, but where Photoshop measures Radius in terms of pixels, Capture NX-D measures it by percentage. In Photoshop you have to factor in different camera resolutions, so for a given print size, a D90’s 12-megapixel image will need a different Radius value to a D810’s 36-megapixel image. But in Capture NX-D Radius is related to the output size of the image, which is more logical for ‘output’ sharpening.