I'd forgotten that this product was so expensive - $99.

On reflection, after two years of use, I'd say that it was easily worth far more than that.

On the surface of it, this script offers a set of sharpening routines which use Photoshop's built in Unsharp Masking and other tools. The interface is plain, if not ugly, and there are no fun dials to play with.

In reality, what this offers is perfection, time and again. Unlike most things to do with photographs, there are hard and fast rules with mathematical formulae for how to apply unsharp masking, and they are based not on the kind of image, but on the input type and resolution and on the output technology and resolution. I have a copy of those formulae on my desktop, but they are a pain to calculate, and easy to get wrong. They're also almost impossible to explain to a non-technical person. Photokit Sharpener offers powerfully perfect capture sharpening and output sharpening. For 80% of pictures that's all you need. For the other 20%, it also offers creative sharpening and softening, where you can play to your heart's content. It's all done non-destructively, so if it's not right, there's no problem, and you can easily switch layers on and off to see what's going on.

As a production tool, it's invaluable. Until I found Photokit Sharpener, I couldn't understand why the shots from my £3,000 Nikon with a £1,000 lens were so unsharp when reproduced as comercial offest litho print. Now I have people (journalists, photographers, designers, printers) looking at adverts, annual reports, etc, and saying "how did you get them that sharp"?

As a final end to this story, Photokit Sharpener is as good as much more expensive sharpeners, such as the one produced by Nik software. But there is one more tool which I would recommend anyone to get, which is FocusMagic. FocusMagic is a refocuser rather than sharpener — a deconvolution tool which actually calculates the original focus. Combining FocusMagic with Photokit Sharpener produces results which (in someone else's words) "literally jump off the page".