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BPN Member
Excellent sharpening actions (for free!)
I posted this as a "sticky" in Wildlife, but the actions are really helpful for Avian, Wildlife and Landscape photography (and I would think Macro too).
Workflow mods - feel free to "stick" this to the top of this forum as well...
A friend of mine, a very talented South African landscape photographer by the name of Philip Perold (who is also a programming and Photoshop guru), has developed some excellent and helpful actions for sharpening your images for web presentation. He kindly gave me permission to share the link here. I think you will find this VERY helpful. 
His sharpening technique is based on Marc Adamus' theories on sharpening, with some personal tweaks based on experimentation.
He has developed 2 very distinct actions:
1. The first one is aimed at landscape photography and sharpens all the fine detail you find in a landscape image. This works very well and I find I use this most of the time for sizing and sharpening my landscape images for web use. You need to play with the opacity of the resulting "sharpened" layers yourself until you are satisfied.
2. The second one is aimed at wildlife and avian photography. Here his algorithms are programmed to only sharpen the fine details of the image that is most in focus (almost like the sharpening mask in Lightroom). Again, it creates a "sharp" layer which you need to adjust in terms of opacity until you get the result you desire. I have my own sharpening workflow for wildlife/avian images, but I do find Philip's action highly helpful in photos where the background and environment surrounding your subject is very busy and creating a selection of the subject will take a long time. 
Take note there are certain image sizes pre-programmed into these actions, which aren't too hard to reverse-engineer to get to the desired size you want. For BPN purposes, the 1024px/1000px (for horizontal) and 760px (for vertical) settings should work just fine.
Feel free to download the actions and load them into your PS workflow. They should work for CS4 and CS5 and some of the newer PS Elements packages.
Also - please browse through Philip's site and galleries, he's got some great images...
WEBSITE: www.philipperold.com
ACTIONS: www.philipperold.com/links
Last edited by Morkel Erasmus; 11-02-2011 at 05:40 AM.
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Post a Thank You. - 1 Thanks
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Thanks Morkel. I'll give them a try. I agree making selections is a pain.
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Morkel, the links don't work for me, I'm on a Mac and I wonder if that makes a difference. Just was interested to see what he advocates. I've just changed my workflow (again!
), as far as sharpening goes, so that I can produce my master file and it will re-size without needing sharpening to suit that size. For my sort of work, it just makes sense not to have to do the sharpening last so I'm much happier. Thanks for the link anyway, some lovely photography.
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BPN Member
Thanks guys.
Hilary you should be able to download the action file, and then bring it into PS even if you are on a Mac?
I am not sure how you will be able to get optimum web sharpness without resizing after downscaling?
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Morkel, all I get with the link is a text page. Not sure why but would have loved to see his approach to sharpening. Never mind. There are so many ways to get an effective result and I just keep looking and learning.
As far as sharpening, I'm not so interested in web sharpening as that isn't my prime interest, more that I need a sharpening method which is independent of size so that my fine art and competition images can be resized to suit. For instance, with the complex nature of some of the work I do, if I want to put them up here for critiquing, I have to resize and then do my sharpening and layer masking to control the areas which need sharpening versus the areas which are intentionally soft. Depending on the image it can be quite a bit of masking. Then if I decide to send it to a competition and print to, say 11in, I need to go back a step and start the whole masking and sharpening functions again. If the image then goes into my exhibition and limited edition portfolio I need to experiment with prints at various sizes to get the best size to show the work. This means doing the whole sharpening business again and again. It just becomes to hard and then short cuts are made and the final printed image is less than it could be.
So for wildlife images which I put up for c&c, I wouldn't use anything complicated because they are just intended for honing the eye and finessing composing and production techniques not for competition etc. (except when I get something which may suit BBC wpy, for instance!
).
So for the past year I've been attending seminars and workshops, especially those given by Fine Art Photographers where they produce complex files and have the same sizing issues. The best way I can see to do this is by using a local contrast adjustment on a luminosity mask and then add a non destructive sharpening layer over the top. This means that sharpening doesn't involve any change to the actual pixels in your image which is quite important to me. You use your luminosity mask with a high pass filter with a blend mode to suit. Start with Overlay then you can duplicate the layer and use Hard Light if you require additional sharpening. The sharpening layer will contain a fine map of the image detail and when you resize, it will resize with the original image so your non destructive sharpening works at any size. If you decide to increase sharpening at a size for any reason, you can just go to that layer and tweak it, or duplicate it. Additionally, if you decide to mask out some area which you want softer, your layer mask will also resize with everything else.
Now this is more work than I would do for anything other than my complex, many layered images (such as these http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...to-Hilary-Hann ) where I can have working files of up to 1gb in size. It isn't for everyone, but I am always looking for ways to refine my workflow and the biggest plus is having a master file which really is a master. Not a Master (7x5) and a Master (web) etc. etc.
But always looking for better ways to do every step of the processing.
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Hilary,
Have you seen this thread:
Important Sharpening Information!
http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...read.php/18534
Having come from drum scanned large format landscape photography where I made large prints (I've sold up to 4x5 foot prints), I'm always pushing digital. I do a lot of digital mosaics, and my files are often quite large, more than a gigabyte (some up to 5 gigabytes). Layers add too much in file size, so if I use a layer, I flatten the image pretty quickly, but save intermediate steps along the way in case I have to go back. I delete the intermediate steps much later after I've made a big print. I prepare my files with the maximum resolution I can get out of the image data, even if I don't immediately intend to print that size. The work flow includes the Richardson-Lucy deconvolution described above. Then when I want to make a print, I resize, do a simple unsharp mask apply the ICC profile for the printer and paper and print.
Roger
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BPN Member
Hilary,
On a Mac, go to the link on the page and 'Save Linked File to Downloads.'
Then import it into PS.
Using PS3, I had to flatten the image after all the action was taken on the Landscape set. It wasn't automatic.
It seems to work, but I haven't had a chance to give the results a careful evaluation.
- Bill
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Thanks Roger, I'll look at the thread. It is a wonderfully rich area for discussion and development and everyday I learn new techniques. Film was never this demanding for me!
Bill, I'll give that a try. Thanks.
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Originally Posted by
Hilary Hann
Film was never this demanding for me!
Yeah! That's because film had such low signal to noise ratio, and if doing slides, must lower dynamic range than DSLR images.
Roger
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BPN Member

Originally Posted by
Bill Jobes
Hilary,
On a Mac, go to the link on the page and 'Save Linked File to Downloads.'
Then import it into PS.
Using PS3, I had to flatten the image after all the action was taken on the Landscape set. It wasn't automatic.
It seems to work, but I haven't had a chance to give the results a careful evaluation.
- Bill
Hilary and Mac owners,
I forgot to mention, when the file downloads (right-click on the web site link), it comes in as a file with a ".txt" extension.
In your Mac Finder, remove this (".txt") by simply deleting it from the end of the file name, so the file extension is now an ".atn" extension,.
Then PS will recognize and load it into your Actions.
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Bill, thanks for that, makes perfect sense.