Action: PostCard Sharp Duplicate first document Flatten Image Duplicate current layer 2 Duplicate current layer 2 Duplicate current layer 2 Duplicate current layer 2 Select layer “Background copy 3” Without Make Visible Set current layer To: layer Name: “Dark halos” Select layer “Background copy 4” Without Make Visible Set current layer To: layer Name: “Light halos” Select layer “Background copy” Without Make Visible Gaussian Blur Radius: 1.5 pixels Select layer “Background copy 2” Without Make Visible Gaussian Blur Radius: 1 pixels Select layer “Dark halos” Without Make Visible Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel of layer “Background copy” Calculation: subtract Scale: 1 Offset: 128 Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel Calculation: overlay Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel Calculation: overlay Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel Calculation: overlay Set current layer To: layer Blend Range List: blend range list blend range Channel: gray channel This Layer Black Min: 0 This Layer Source Black Max: 0 This Layer Source White Min: 128 This Layer Source White Max: 128 Underlying Layer Black Min: 0 Underlying Layer Black Max: 0 Underlying Layer White Min: 255 Underlying Layer White Max: 255 Layer Styles: layer styles Scale: 100% Select layer “Light halos” Without Make Visible Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel of layer “Background copy 2” Calculation: subtract Scale: 1 Offset: 128 Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel Calculation: overlay Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel Calculation: overlay Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel Calculation: overlay Delete layer “Background copy” Delete layer “Background copy 2” Make New: channel At: mask channel Using: reveal all Apply Image With: calculation Source: red channel of Background With Preserve Transparency Apply Image With: calculation Source: green channel of Background Calculation: screen With Preserve Transparency Apply Image With: calculation Source: blue channel of Background Calculation: screen With Preserve Transparency Invert Gaussian Blur Radius: 4 pixels Curves Adjustment: curves adjustment list curves adjustment Channel: current channel Curve: point list point: 0, 0 point: 111, 168 point: 255, 255 Set current layer To: layer Mode: overlay Select layer “Dark halos” Without Make Visible Set current layer To: layer Mode: overlay Make New: channel At: mask channel Using: reveal all Apply Image With: calculation Source: mask channel of layer “Light halos” With Preserve Transparency Select layer “Light halos” Without Make Visible Set current layer To: layer Blend Range List: blend range list blend range Channel: gray channel This Layer Black Min: 127 This Layer Source Black Max: 127 This Layer Source White Min: 255 This Layer Source White Max: 255 Underlying Layer Black Min: 0 Underlying Layer Black Max: 0 Underlying Layer White Min: 255 Underlying Layer White Max: 255 Layer Styles: layer styles Scale: 100% Select layer “Background” Without Make Visible Set Selection To: all Copy Select layer “Light halos” Without Make Visible Paste Anti-alias: none Set current layer To: layer Name: “hiraloam luminosity” Unsharp Mask Amount: 500% Radius: 35 pixels Threshold: 3 Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel of Background Calculation: darken Opacity: 50% Set current layer To: layer Opacity: 1% Set current layer To: layer Opacity: 15% Set current layer To: layer Mode: luminosity Duplicate current layer 2 Set current layer To: layer Name: “hiraloam color” Set current layer To: layer Mode: color Select layer “hiraloam luminosity” Without Make Visible Make New: channel At: mask channel Using: reveal all Apply Image With: calculation Source: RGB channel of merged layer Calculation: darken With Preserve Transparency Select layer “Light halos” Without Make Visible Set current layer To: layer Opacity: 7% Set current layer To: layer Opacity: 75% Select layer “Background” Without Make Visible Set Selection To: all Copy Select layer “hiraloam color” Without Make Visible Paste Anti-alias: none Set current layer To: layer Name: “Base Copy for Comparison” Select layer “hiraloam color” Without Make Visible Select layer “Base Copy for Comparison” Without Make Visible Hide current layer This is a sharpening routine that I am intending to discuss in my Superadvanced classes in March 2009. It is a work in progress. This documentation was updated on 4 January 2009. OBJECTIVES: 1) Many of the images I work on are not important enough to justify much investment of time sharpening. Therefore, this Action's default setting is designed for batch processing, if necessary, to give a "good enough" sharpen in most cases, understanding that finetuning would make it better. Several limitations of normal sharpening are addressed, so it's a better "universal" (one-size-fits-all) procedure than anything else I've seen. The Action applies the equivalent of both conventional (low Radius, high Amount) and hiraloam (high Radius, low Amount) sharpens. 2) At the same time, powerful methods of altering the sharpen on a case-by-case basis are available: *Noise reduction may be different for light and dark conventional sharpening *Noise reduction may act as Photoshop's USM Threshold does (reduce all sharpening), or merely eliminate small sharpens without affecting larger ones. *Excessive sharpening may be curtailed by placing a limit on how much variation from the original is allowed. *Sharpening is restricted by color intensity as well as by darkness. *Can change opacity of any component or disallow it completely (for example, eliminating all hiraloam). 3) The Action is designed so that it could be batched, sight unseen, on a folder full of images, when time doesn't permit anything more careful. Because of that, the settings are conservative, because we don't want the defaults to oversharpen typical images. This implies that it is more likely you will want to increase the default sharpening than decrease it--but, of course, it depends on this image. STRUCTURE. The Action requires a flattened RGB file. It produces six layers. From TOP to BOTTOM, they are 6) Copy of base image for ready comparison with what's beneath (visibility disabled at the outset). 5) Hiraloam layer in Color mode, unmasked, set to 15% opacity. 4) Hiraloam Luminosity mode, masked by luminosity, set to 15% opacity. 3) Conventional for light halos only, masked by color/luminosity, set to 75% opacity. 2) Conventional for dark halos only, masked by color/luminosity. 1) Base image. REDUCING THE OVERALL EFFECT--QUICK AND DIRTY If you consider that the default sharpen is too much, the quick ways to repair are as follows: 1) Reduce the opacity of layer 3 (light halos) to 50-60%. This is the layer most likely to be causing the problem. 2) If that fails to satisfy, or if it moves in the right direction but you want more, make the top layer (original image) visible and set its opacity to taste, perhaps 20% or so. CONTROLLING CONVENTIONAL SHARPENING--ADVANCED. If you wish to control the sharpen more accurately than the above quick methods, I recommend turning off all but the bottom layer and then adding one layer at a time, observing what its impact is, and then deciding how to proceed. NOISE REDUCTION. Although noise suppression as such is not on by default, this method's masking makes serious noise less likely. Nevertheless, noise often needs to be reduced, particularly in the light halos layer. If you feel there is excessive noise, I'd first recommend turning everything off except the base and the dark halos layer. This should make any dark noise obvious. When satisfied with this layer, move to the light halos. The dark halos/light halos layers are set to Overlay mode. They are 50% gray, which does not affect underlying layers, except where halos occur. Although the dark halos layer also contains light halos, they are eliminated by a Blend If that cuts off all parts of the layer lighter than 50% gray. Therefore, no matter how much you lighten this layer, it can never make the underlying image any lighter than it originally was. All you can do is eliminate dark haloing completely. To reduce noise, apply an appropriate curve to the layer. In principle this curve can be of any shape that does the job, and can be used to emphasize certain sharpening ranges while de-emphasizing others. In practice four simple curves meet most needs. All four involve placing points either at the center of the curve or at the shadow point (top right in the darkness-to-the-right orientation used in all my books), or both. Assuming that darkness-to-the-right orientation, and that we are working with the dark halos layer in an effort to reduce noise: *If the shadow point is lowered (lightened) without putting a holding point in the center, the center lightens as well. The result is similar to the Photoshop Threshold. All sharpening is reduced somewhat, but modest sharpening is eliminated altogether, killing the noise. *If the shadow point is left alone but the center point is lowered or moved to the right, noise vanishes along with all other modest sharpening. Areas of heavy sharpening, however, are unaffected. *If the shadow point is moved to the left and the center point is lowered or moved to the right, noise and other modest sharpening vanishes, but heavy sharpening is increased. *If the shadow point is moved to the left and a holding point is placed at the center, overall sharpening is increased but there is no noise reduction. NOTE: the holding point at the center cannot be omitted. Without it, the whole image becomes not just sharper, but darker. The light halos layer works as the dark halos layer does, except that all curve moves are reversed. HINT: Getting noise out of the dark halos layer is usually pretty easy. When an area appears excessively noisy the light halos layer is usually the culprit, and it may be more difficult to remove the noise without also removing desirable sharpening. INCREASING SHARPENING WITH PRELOADED MASKS ON THE CONVENTIONAL LAYERS. The dark and light halos layers are strong. Their effects are cut back substantially by layer masks. By default, the two masks are the same, but they can be altered separately. Most of the time, if you wish to make a change, it will be to increase sharpening by lightening one or both masks. If, on the other hand, you feel that the sharpening is overall too strong (not just a matter of noise, nor of the image being presharpened, see below) it's usually best to just decrease layer opacity rather than messing with the mask. The layer mask restricts sharpening to darker and less colorful areas. Each mask pixel is based on the lightest corresponding pixel in any RGB channel, and then inverted. For the purposes of this mask, a white area, a sky, and a red rose are pretty much the same. The white is light in all three channels, the sky is light in the blue, and the flower light in the red. Since the mask is based on the lightest of the three channels, and each object does have at least one light channel, the result in the mask is light in each case. As the mask has then been inverted, making it black, little if any sharpening will be allowed in these areas. That's a good thing, because sharpening skies and brightly colored flowers is ordinarily not a clever idea. A minimalist sharpening of faces is allowed, because faces are slightly more neutral than skies or flowers, meaning that the lightest channel is darker. HINT: Before working on the layer mask, Shift-click on it to temporarily disable it. This shows full unmasked sharpening, and what it is that the mask is protecting. Increasing conventional sharpening requires lightening the mask. If you are an inveterate curvewriter you can do this in a way that emphasizes specific areas without affecting others. The two bread-and-butter moves, however, are: *Lightening the mask by lowering (lightening) the shadow point of the curve increases sharpening everywhere. It starts to introduce sharpening in areas where it was previously totally absent, such as skies. The sharpening in these areas will still be much less than elsewhere. *Lightening the mask by choosing and lowering (lightening) a point somewhere in the interior (usually in the three-quartertone of the mask) increases sharpening in subtler areas without introducing it into brighter areas. *Lightening the mask by moving the highlight point of the curve to the right exaggerates strong sharpening more than weak. Sometimes it works, but it can also bring out shadow noise. WARNING: When curving he mask, be sure you have clicked into it to activate it, as otherwise you will be curving the sharpening layer itself. PRESHARPENED IMAGES. I recommend turning off all sharpening in raw acquisition modules because it makes it difficult to re-sharpen later. Most sharpening routines act proportionally more strongly on edges that are already well pronounced. Presharpening exaggerates the edges before the main sharpening occurs, and makes it difficult to sharpen aggressively before major artifacts start to appear. The symptom of trying to sharpen presharpened images is that edges that are already distinct become ludicrous, and noise may also become unacceptable, while the image remains too soft in areas subject to only moderate sharpening. Correcting this is usually done in the dark halos layer, but similar moves in the light halos layer can also be helpful. The curve shape is image-dependent, but always lowers the black point and raises the white point, resulting in a flatter curve. Then (again assuming the dark halos layer, and a darkness-to-the-right curves orientation), an intermediate point goes to the right of center, and is raised. The exact location of this point depends on the image. The purpose of this curve shape is to maintain sharpening in moderate areas while restricting it where sharpening would otherwise be heavy. WARNING: It is important, when curving the dark halos layer, that the center (50%) point not get darker. If it does, it will darken--not sharpen--areas that should be untouched. It's OK if this point gets lighter, as this will reduce noise. If the 50% point remains constant, there is no noise reduction. CONTROLLING HIRALOAM SHARPENING. The two hiraloam layers, Luminosity and Color, are set to 15% opacity. At 100% they would look absurd. This overkill is needed to ensure that the sharpening on the conventional layers shows through sufficiently. The Luminosity hiraloam layer is masked by the luminosity of the base layer. Therefore, the effect of this layer is reduced where the image gets darker. You can lighten or eliminate this mask if you like, but it risks plugging shadows. I prefer just to increase layer opacity if it seems like the image can take more hiraloam. The Color hiraloam layer has no mask. In some cases you may wish to place a luminosity or other mask there to avoid enhancing darker colors. HINT: Any previous use of heavily blurred masks suggests being conservative with hiraloam sharpening. HINT FOR FACES: When the skintone is naturally light, the hiraloam light haloing can become disturbing. If so, change the mode of the lower hiraloam layer from Luminosity to Darken, or, more ambitiously, duplicate the layer, set one to Lighten and the other to Darken, and adjust their opacities to taste. Note that either method costs you the ability to prevent minor color shifting, which is ordinarily controlled by the Color layer above. It may be necessary to reduce the opacity of the Color layer to compensate, or turn it off altogether. It's unlikely that you would want no color shift at all, but if you do, activate the top (original) layer and set to Color. HINT: The Color hiraloam can be very powerful on certain images but it is hard to visualize the effect. If you are planning to adjust it, I'd suggest moving the slider all the way out to 100% opacity. That will make the image radioactive, but it will also make apparent exactly what areas are being affected, so that you can keep your eye on them when reducing opacity to something more workable (unlikely to be higher than 25%, but you never know). LIMITATIONS OF THIS ACTIONS 1. Does not work in LAB or CMYK. 2. The Radius setting is not variable. It is set to 1.5 pixels for conventional dark sharpen, 1.0 pixels for conventional light sharpen, and 35 pixels for hiraloam. These settings are sensible defaults for images between 15 and 30 mb. Allowing Radius variation would improve quality in a minority of images. This Action, however, has so much flexibility in other areas that most of the impact of Radius flexibility is duplicated. I do not currently use this Action for the highest quality work. If I did, I would program in a Stop in three places so that I could adjust Radii. For the large majority of work, however, it's not worth slowing the Action down. 3. In theory there should be an additional copy of the original, set to Color, above the two conventional-halo layers. Any color shift provoked by those two layers would thus be eliminated. While technically speaking those color shifts are undesirable, the gain by eliminating them is so minuscule that I don't believe it's worth it to slow the Action down by going there. 4. The Hiraloam luminosity layer is produced by applying the USM filter followed by blending the original into it at 50% opacity, Darken mode. This reduces the impact of light haloing. While other percentages of darkening might conceivably be more appropriate I believe that the gain would be so minor as not to be worth the bother, even in extremely demanding work. 5. Similarly, no choice of Threshold for the hiraloam layers. It's set to 2; that's too likely to be close enough to program a stop into the Action. NOTE: Threshold on the two conventional layers is irrelevant, as the Photoshop USM filter is not used to create them. The equivalent of the Threshold command in conventional sharpening is found elsewhere (see "Noise Reduction", above). 6. If you become a devotee of hiraloam sharpening in Color mode (layer 5) you should make a habit of reducing color noise before applying this action, even if the noise isn't currently bothersome--that top layer can really accentuate it if you go much above 20% opacity. Accordingly, prior to running the Action, you might wish to run the Surface Blur filter at minimalist settings like Radius 3 Threshold 6, and then fade to Color mode. 7. The Photoshop default name for a single flattened layer is "Background." The Action does not work if you have renamed it to something else. 8. Over 20 steps are involved in this Action--more than, by default, are retained as history. Consequently, you may wish to increase your number of history states, or work the Action on a duplicate file, if you need some type of multiple undo later. NOTE: If you have applied the Action by mistake and simply wish to restore the status quo, delete all but the bottom layer. However, previous history states will be gone. Dan Margulis