Post by Stevewebb on Oct 25, 2012 8:55:44 GMT
3 Sharpening Actions To Speed Up Your Workflow
Sharpening is something that we should do to every image but in various strengths depending on the subject and output method.
The first form of sharpening is Input or Capture sharpening which is done in your RAW processor and will be covered in another tutorial.
The second sharpening is referred to as Output Sharpening or Sharpening for Print. It is generally the very last thing you will do to your image before saving.
Below I will show you how to record three actions that will be applied on a single button press to speed up your processing. I call them Sharpen Low, Sharpen Medium and Sharpen High.
Go to the actions panel, click on the create new action button.
When the New Action dialog box appears, name it Sharpen Medium, give it a shortcut key (I use F10), and click Record.
Now go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask
Set the amount to 85%, Radius to 1 and Threshold to 4 and click OK.
That has applied the sharpening but we are not quite finished yet. Applying sharpening directly to colour images can sometimes cause halos or colour artefacts so we need to apply one more step.
Immediately after you click OK and apply the unsharp mask, go to Edit > Fade Unsharp Mask
When the Fade dialog box appears, simply set the blend mode to Luminosity and leave the Opacity at 100%
What this has done is applied the sharpening only to the luminosity (detail) of the image and avoided the colour channels.
Now go back to the actions panel and click Stop Recording.
You now have the Sharpen Medium action ready for use simply by pressing the F10 key.
Simply repeat the steps above to create another two actions for Sharpen Low (F9 key) and Sharpen High (F11 key).
Sharpen Low has the following amounts in the dialog box.
Sharpen High has the following amounts in the dialog box.
When to use each of the actions comes down to personal choice and finding what works best under certain circumstances. As a rule of thumb I use them as below.
Sharpen Low – Potraits, Animals or Flowers (or after re-sizing an image that has already had sharpening applied)
Sharpen Medium – The one used most for general images and after re-sizing an image that hasn’t been sharpened previously.
Sharpen High – For images with lots of well defined edges like architecture, cars or anything metal.
Sharpening is something that we should do to every image but in various strengths depending on the subject and output method.
The first form of sharpening is Input or Capture sharpening which is done in your RAW processor and will be covered in another tutorial.
The second sharpening is referred to as Output Sharpening or Sharpening for Print. It is generally the very last thing you will do to your image before saving.
Below I will show you how to record three actions that will be applied on a single button press to speed up your processing. I call them Sharpen Low, Sharpen Medium and Sharpen High.
Go to the actions panel, click on the create new action button.
When the New Action dialog box appears, name it Sharpen Medium, give it a shortcut key (I use F10), and click Record.
Now go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask
Set the amount to 85%, Radius to 1 and Threshold to 4 and click OK.
That has applied the sharpening but we are not quite finished yet. Applying sharpening directly to colour images can sometimes cause halos or colour artefacts so we need to apply one more step.
Immediately after you click OK and apply the unsharp mask, go to Edit > Fade Unsharp Mask
When the Fade dialog box appears, simply set the blend mode to Luminosity and leave the Opacity at 100%
What this has done is applied the sharpening only to the luminosity (detail) of the image and avoided the colour channels.
Now go back to the actions panel and click Stop Recording.
You now have the Sharpen Medium action ready for use simply by pressing the F10 key.
Simply repeat the steps above to create another two actions for Sharpen Low (F9 key) and Sharpen High (F11 key).
Sharpen Low has the following amounts in the dialog box.
Sharpen High has the following amounts in the dialog box.
When to use each of the actions comes down to personal choice and finding what works best under certain circumstances. As a rule of thumb I use them as below.
Sharpen Low – Potraits, Animals or Flowers (or after re-sizing an image that has already had sharpening applied)
Sharpen Medium – The one used most for general images and after re-sizing an image that hasn’t been sharpened previously.
Sharpen High – For images with lots of well defined edges like architecture, cars or anything metal.