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Note: A pre-release version of Photo RAW 2023 is featured in this article The final product may be slightly different.

Tack Sharp AI in ON1 Photo RAW corrects blurry photos caused to camera shake or missed focus. Tack Sharp AI will salvage those slightly blurry photos and make them usable and shareable with friends and family. If you are a handheld photographer, you are familiar with capturing the near-perfect image, but there’s just a bit of camera shake. Tack Sharp AI is for you. Wildlife and portrait photographs will benefit, too, if your focus is a little off. And landscape photographers like me can get a boost in sharpening for scenes that are slightly soft due to atmospherics, or just because that’s how some RAW files are.

Tack Sharp AI by itself may leave speckled artifacts, resembling a pointillism painting.

ON1 Tack Sharp AI Controls

Tack Sharp AI is built into the Noise & Sharpening section of the Develop tab in ON1 Photo RAW’s Edit module. To apply AI sharpening to your photo, click the Tack Sharp AI tab. Photo RAW evaluates your images for blur and shake and presents a side-by-side before/after comparison showing the results of the sharpening and focus improvement. There are two controls to refine the results:

Tack Sharp AI Deblur - set the overall strength of the sharpening and focus correction AI
Micro Sharpening - adjust the level of crispness for fine details

In my work with the pre-release of Photo RAW 2023, the default were almost always the best results. Occasionally, I would lower the Micro Sharpening. Higher values tend to introduce speckled patterns into the sharpened photo. And there is an easy way to address this… read on!

Use Tack Sharp AI along with NoNoise AI for the best sharpening results.

Use Tack Sharp AI and NoNoise AI Together

If you have worked with noise reduction software, like NoNoise AI in Photo RAW, you know that correcting noise is a push and pull between smoothing out noise grain and maintaining detail. Sharpening is a similar balancing act, increasing crispness of details without over sharpening and boosting textures.

ON1 Photo RAW has a Both tab in its Noise & Sharpening tab that puts the sliders of Tack Sharp AI side by side with the NoNoise AI control. Recall I mentioned Tack Sharp AI can introduce a speckled pattern, especially if Micro Sharpening is pushed too far? Well … in the Both tab, Tack Sharp AI and NoNoise AI are applied, and those speckled get balanced out. The net/net is the best of both worlds. A great improvement in sharpness without an increase in grain and noise.

When your photo needs Ai sharpening, I advocate starting your work in the Both tab for the best results from Tack Sharp AI.

Pro tip: Switch the NoNoise AI Model if the results don’t look good out of the gate.

Areas Of Improvement For Tack Sharp AI

Tack Sharp AI does have some room for improvement. The sharpening Ai can be aggressive at times, and dialing back the Tack Sharp AI Deblur slider is not always the solution. In the photo below, my subject is soft. I was shooting handheld and it was relatively windy (and I also know I don’t have the steadiest of hands). I needed the full strength of Tack Sharp AI to get the sheep crisp and sharp. The tree line in the distance is over-sharpened. Fiddling with the Micro Sharpening slider helped some, although it became a tradeoff between maintaining the detail in the sheep’s wool versus over-sharpening the trees.

Can I deal with this in ON1 Photo RAW in another way? Of course. Duplicate the layer, apply Tack Sharp AI to the upper layer, and then use a mask to remove the sharpening from the background. (And that gets much, much easier with Mask AI, another new feature in Photo RAW 2023).

While ON1 continues to improve their AI smarts, the rest of the Photo RAW ecosystem has other tools to fill the gaps.

ON1 Tack Sharp AI Or Topaz Labs Sharpen AI?

The burning question on everyone’s mind: Is ON1 Tack Sharp better than Topaz Sharpen AI?

That is actually a challenging question to answer in September of 2022 for two reasons. First, ON1 Photo RAW 2023 is still pre-release software. The final product is still several weeks away, and the AI brains in Photo RAW may change. Second, Topaz Labs recently announced Topaz Photo AI which undoubtedly updates their AI algorithms.

That being said, I did push several photos through both Tack Sharp AI and Topaz Sharpen AI to see how ON1’s new feature holds up. I took 16-bit TIFFs and let each software do it’s automatic work. In ON1, I applied the defaults in the Both tab. In Topaz, I let Sharpen AI automatically detect and apply correction.

The results? Tack Sharp AI holds its own. There is a spot or two where I’d give a nod to Topaz… the over-sharpening mentioned above I didn’t see in Sharpen AI. I also thought Topaz did slightly better with human faces. Yet once again, ON1 has additional tools like Portrait AI for further refinement. So if ON1 is your processing hub of choice, you aren’t limited.

Conclusion

ON1 Tack Sharp AI is an excellent feature and produces solid results. Photo RAW users will be very happy with Tack Sharp AI.

If you are deciding between Tack Sharp AI and Topaz Sharpen AI (or the new Photo AI), I think your decision will be driven more by other factors. What is your “home base” for your photos, your asset manager? If it’s ON1 Photo RAW - you’re done. If it’s another tool like Lightroom or Capture One, remember that Photo RAW does not run as a plug-in. I think we’ll see Tack Sharp AI fold into the NoNoise AI plug-in in the future (my prediction, I have no inside knowledge). And at that point, plug-in users will have more choices for AI-powered sharpening.