The Noise Reduction and Sharpening sliders might be the obvious go-to tools for optimizing high-ISO images, but these can easily leave you with soft, wishy-washy detail or exaggerated noise as you try to play one off against the other. In fact, there are better ways to get your high-ISO images looking smoother and sharper.
Sharpening
Almost all digital images need some degree of sharpening. This is partly because of the way colour images data is interpolated from the camera sensor's red-green-blue pixel array, partly because most cameras have anti-aliasing filters over the sensor to prevent moiré/interference effects with fine patterns, and partly because no lens is perfect and will deliver different levels of sharpness and different aperture/zoom settings.
But it's good to be clear about what kind of sharpening is applied and when. The kind of sharpening applied by default for in-camera JPEGs and most RAW processing software is 'capture sharpening', which addresses the types of image softness described above.
But there's also 'creative sharpening', which you can use to digitally blur backgrounds or intensify the sharpening on your main subject.
Finally, there's 'output sharpening', which is used to optimise the photo's detail rendition for different output devices. The type of sharpening you need for on-screen display is quite different to the settings needed for a large art print or publication in a magazine.
You can use capture sharpening and creative sharpening to enhance your pictures, but output sharpening is best kept for when you're preparing an image for a specific purpose.
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Verdict: 3.3 stars $199 is a lot of money to pay for a simplified AI photo fixer and there’s not even a trial version, just an ‘unconditional’ money back guarantee. When it works, Photo AI is good, even spectacular, but the image and its problems have to fall within its window of fixability. Photo AI is also slow, over-aggressive with noise reduction and can only fix the right sort of blur.
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