Hello, I would like to raise again the power of sharpening, the default setting “standard” probably likes many instagrammers, but already the soft option is too strong for normal users, could you reduce the sharpness on the “soft” setting when sharpening glass is a drama, completely disabling sharpening is too soft and I like the way Dxo sharpens, it is the only thing that at the moment “destroys” photos. I think that weakening the sharpening power by 30% will be the desired one.
2 Likes
You have several settings… standard, soft and you can disable the sharpening.
Soft is too strong for me, so I disable it.
A slider would be better, because I like the correction as long as it’s subtle, but at least the disable option is here.
2 Likes
Exactly as you write, soft is too sharp and it should be otherwise, it is illogical and should be changed, turning off sharpening adds the need for post production in this area.
1 Like
Agreed. Standard is much too sharp and Soft is sometimes still too much. A compromise can be found by using Soft + moving the Force Details slider to the left but there’s something exaggerated here.
3 Likes
Thanks Patrick, but should the “force detail” adjustment be used to weaken the sharpening power?
Good question. Both Lens Softness and Force details have something to do with sharpening. What this exactly means deserves some explanations from DxO.
Lens softness is obviously here to correct optical defaults and Force Details is probably here to fix a limit to the AI driven process of recovering/inventing details. Both affect what we see as “sharpening”. But how do they interact ?
There’s a similar question in Photolab about how the “Contrast” slider and the Tone curve" interact. Both affect contrast.
This is where the software documentation could be more comprehensive and a little bit more technical. Many have been asking for this since years. Still waiting…
5 Likes
The matter is simple, Dxo should weaken the sharpening power for the soft setting. The other issue is I would like to know the reasoning behind why it was set this way, the only thing I can think of is that photos are supposed to be always sharp or not at all and if you want a little less sharpness, buy photolab and adjust it there. In photolab I always set the sharpness to minus 0.50.
Just a question – why then did you buy PR?
I’m not the one questionned, but I am in the same case (minus 1 for me).
I have Photolab 6. I didn’t update for Photolab 7.
I used only Photolab for denoising, with DNG export for Lightroom.
PureRaw wasn’t a possible substitute cause the luminance slider was set to 40 with no possibility to change, and it was a showstopper for me. I need 30 max.
On top of that, I didn’t like DeepPrime XD and I preferred Ligthroom new AI Denoise to DeepPrime - so I don’t use Photolab anymore.
Now that PureRaw is, with the version 4, a real denoise software, and that it has XD2 that seems to work well in my first tests, I’m considering it seriously, as I probably won’t update my Photolab anymore.
2 Likes
I didn’t buy PR, but PR4 is better at de-noising than Photolab and PR3.
I checked the focus again and I have to correct the focus from -0.5 to minus 1, this will be below the soft setting in PR4 and it is not over-sharpened.
Yes, the soft setting is really a surprising setting.
It’s not soft at all.
This correction should be here only to correct sharpness uniformity as it’s an optical correction.
It’s doing tons of sharpening on top.
A slider is what is needed, as always.
Currently the only acceptable setting for me is “off” but I need to play with the force detail option to see how all this interacts.
1 Like
New tests today… tried the “force detail” stuff and the on/off for lens softness.
I would tend to leave “force detail” to 0, negative values produces a kind of weird look, positive values get more detail & more noise.
I’ve yet to compare for instance a “25/0” to a “30/20” (luminance/force detail).
I kind of like the lens softness output, it brings more details and not so much noise (I can add sharpness in Lightroom, I get approximately the same sharpness but more noise)
But I would need to divide the effect by 2 to get something I like.
Too much sharpness can ruin an image…
1 Like
It remains to wait for Photolab or for a revised version of PR4, because to turn off sharpening I have no intention and Dxo does not seem to understand the meaning of sharpness “soft”, it is possible that they only use smartphones and switched their focus scale 
1 Like
PureRaw is a preprocessor, so images are supposed to be handled by another software after PureRaw.
So, having no sharpening is not necessarily an issue.
However, I find the lens softness algorithm very efficient in sharpening without bringing the noise up.
If I do a bit of sharpening in Lightroom with an image coming from PureRaw, I can bring out the same level of details but I’d get more noise.
The problem with sharpening, you can always add some but you cannot remove it, so I really have no idea why a preprocessor would only have such aggressive sharpening settings.
Yesterday I tried to denoise some of my drone pictures, with a one inch sensor, and the results with the soft setting is really, really awful. The images are ruined.
1 Like
What the soft setting does to skin is horrible! The noise reduction is so good it’s hard to believe. Does DXO ever respond to this issue?
How do you turn off sharpening. I haven’t seen it.