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sharpening with Nik or FM Intellisharpen� Photoshop action


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Jerry,

 

I own both. For the price, you can't beat the FM actions.

 

Incidentally, I know exactly what's happened to you. You went to Fred's site to buy his stair interpolation action and fell in love with all the other toys you saw there. Don't look to me to talk you out of it. I did the same thing. (Try his digital Velvia. Nothing there you can't do on your own--it's an action, after all--but it's pretty nice.)

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iuse Intellisharpen from Miranda or the sharpening tools in the PhotoKit plug-in from <A HREF = http://www.pixelgenius.com> Pixelgenius.com</A> In particular I use the Luminance and Edge sharpening tools and some times the noise reduction tool. Both are infinitely adjustable in intensity but also, because they are in a separate layer, extremely easy to undo. <P>PhotoKit contains over 130 different image manipulation tools. Check it out!
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I just tried convolution sharpening in Photoshop and was impressed - equivalent to the best I could do with USM in the highlights, slightly better in fine detail midtones, and noticably better in the shadows.

 

Go to www.aim-dtpnet.aim/techniques/index.html and click on "Better than USM". It will show you an example image and have you download a zipped file of that give you a bunch of .acf files for Photoshop to use for custom filters.

 

Pick a good fine detailed image and in Photoshop do Filter|Other|Custom, Load Blur 030%.ACF (from the directory you unzipped into), OK. Then do Filter|Other|Custom, Load Sharpen 500%.ACF, OK and you're done.

 

I plan to make a single action that performs both filters and will be using that instead of the best USM I've come up with. I'll have to experiment on settings for less perfect pictures (you know, hand held at too slow a shutter speed, slightly out of focus, etc.)

 

Of course, this assumes you have a low ISO picture that doesn't need edge sharpening while blurring out noise away from edges. That's a whole 'nother story.

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I have no experience with Nik, but I have FM's Intellisharpen

action. The problem with it is that it uses photoshop's

"Find edges" which is not a good edge finder. As a

consequence, it often misses some areas where sharpening

would be useful. For critical work, it is better to do

apply a method similar to FM's action by hand so that you can

control the parameters at every step. This is described on

luminous-landscape as well as on Bruce Fraser's site, and

certainly elsewhere too. Tuan <a href = "http://

www.terragalleria.com">Terra Galleria photography</a>

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