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| TLR Professional Sharpening Toolkit A set of JavaScripts for automating Photoshop CS/CS2 that makes it easy to obtain professional sharpening of your digital images. The scripts in the TLR Professional Sharpening Toolkit can be used for sharpening RGB, CMYK, L*a*b, and grayscale images. Feel free to download my tutorial and visit my learning gallery for useful information about sharpening generally. The toolkit includes a 24 page, full color PDF manual that is ready for printing. The recommended workflow is three-pass sharpening. The first pass should be done right after RAW conversion with the TLR Capture Sharpening script. This is, arguably, the most important round of sharpening for an image. The goal is to restore the sharpness lost during digital capture. Be careful not to get too aggressive during this round of sharpening. You select the type of capture device (high resolution digital camera, film scan, etc.), a mask width, and adjust a couple of sliders. The script does the rest. If you are the sort of photographer who likes full control, just select "Expert Mode" and you determine all of the settings. Capture sharpening is done with a layer mask to limit the effect to the edges in an image when you select Unsharp Mask (USM) as the method. TLR Sharpening Toolkit gives you another option: the enhanced edge mask generates the most well-defined edge mask. If you select Smart Sharpen as your the method, no edge mask is used. The second pass is optional. It is called "Creative Sharpening." You use the TLR Creative Sharpening script. The idea here is to apply localized sharpening. You can also apply localized blurring to deemphasize elements in an image. For creative sharpening, you can use Smart Sharpen or USM sharpening. Both add a Hide All layer mask. If you choose USM, a Luminosity blend is applied. If you choose Highpass, an Overlay blend is applied. Use a soft edge brush with white foreground color to paint in the sharpening (or blurring). A low opacity (e.g. 20 or 25 pixels) is recommended. The TLR Creative Sharpening script also will optionally apply Haze Reduction to the image. This is a great feature that I apply to nearly every image. It uses a technique I learned from Michael Reichmann (http://www.luminous-landscape.com) called Localized Contrast Enhancement. The third pass is output sharpening. You select the intended output device and desired resolution and the TLR Output Sharpening script applies Highpass Filter sharpening with an Overlay blend. Output sharpening is global, except for the extreme highlights and shadows, which are protected with Blend If settings. The TLR Capture Sharpening and TLR Creative Shapening scripts also include surface sharpening. Typically, you will confine all/most of your sharpening efforts to the edges in your image. However, there are times where you will want to sharpen surface detail. Be warned! These scripts do A LOT of processing. With large image files -- like those from film scans, the Canon 1Ds MkII, Canon 1Ds, and Nikon D2X -- the scripts can take several minutes to run. All of the work is done non-destructively, with as many as three or four layers. Canon 1Ds MkII images start out at nearly 100MB. Add several layers and you can easily end up with images that are 650-750 MB in size. I routinely end up imges that large -- just from the sharpening passes. Assume 1GB of RAM at a minimum for images 8MP and larger; 2GB of RAM will give much better performance. The PDF manual has suggestions for getting the most efficient performance with these scripts. Current Version: 2.0 Download the TLR
Professional Sharpening Toolkit for earlier versions of Photoshop. Size 3.71 mb Download the .PDF
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