Hi Amadou,

Congratulations on the completion of your book. Looks as though it's not listed on Amazon yet, but I'll buy a copy as soon as it's available.

I watched your quicktime video on Actions, and noticed that you're using PK sharpener. I've been using this product for about 2 years, and I like the concept of breaking my sharpening up by the capture/creative/print approach. Do you use this product for your bw work too? My only complaint has been that it will only operate on RGB files, meaning that in order to utilize it for my bw work, I'm stuck with files that are 3 times larger than they could be if I could put them in a grayspace.

How do you handle this issue? Do you convert your files to a grayspace after print sharpening, or just live with the files in RGB mode?

Josh

Josh,
Thanks for the interest in the book. As soon as I can wrangle a shipping date from my publisher and/or find out when Amazon will take pre-orders I'll pass it on; we're expecting somewhere around April 10.

I'm a huge fan of PK Sharpener. My only gripe is, like yours, the frustration of having to convert to RGB. One trick to make the grayscale-RGB-grayscale rountrip harmless is to always convert to an RGB space with a gamma that matches your grayscale working space. This avoids quantization/rounding errors that happen with gamma mismatches. Now if you're like me and use a grayscale space with a gamma of neither 1.8 or 2.2, you have to create your own "fake RGB" colorspace. Easier than it sounds and over the weekend I'll post a short tutorial on how to do this.

On a related note, with the passing of Bruce Fraser who was the architect of PKSharpener who knows if it will ever get another update. As a beta tester for Photoshop I put in my wish list for CS4, a built-in PS routine to accomplish what PKSharpener does. Not to take any $ away from PixelGenius, but if there's going to be no more development on that plug-in it would be nice to see Adobe's engineers tackle the problem.

I just posted a link to QT movie that shows how to create gamma matches between RGB and grayscale working spaces.

Thanks Amadou - the QT tip was very helpful.

Are you still using PK Capture sharpen? With the inclusion of sharpening in ACR/Lightroom, I've begun to question if the added step of using PK for capture sharpening is worthwhile. It comes down to the genius of Bruce Fraser or Thomas Knoll . . . both reliable sources I think. Have you noticed differences in the sharpening qualities between the two?

Hope you'll send out a message to your email list when the book is available for purchase.m Just checked Amazon again, and it's not there yet.

Josh

I'm still using PK capture sharpen. Mostly because it's already a part of my workflow, I have actions for it, etc. Also, I'm still shooting a higher ratio of 4x5 film to DSLR for my fine art work, so most of my images are still coming through the scan pipeline. I haven't done side-by-side comparisons between PKS and the ACR or LR routines. If anyone on this forum has done this it would be great to hear about it.

As soon as I get word about the ship status I'll pass it on. If you're getting anxious, imagine how I feel