TLR Portrait Sharpener
Submitted by mitch on Thu, 10/30/2008 - 20:03.
Sharpen portraits without emphasizing blemishes.
TLR Portrait Sharpener is the latest Photoshop tool from The Light's Right!
This is no simple sharpening action that creates a layer and applies USM sharpening. This is a sophisticated sharpening tool for Photoshop CS3/CS4 that combines two kinds of sharpening and skin smoothing. The result is an action that sharpens the details in a portrait like hair, eyes and eye lashes, mouths and teeth, jewelry, etc. without sharpening skin texture.
If you've applied traditional sharpeners to portraits, you've probably noticed that pores and blemishes stand out. Skin can take on a diseased texture. People tend to look older and harsher. The TLR Portrait Sharpener was designed to soften skin texture rather than giving it more definition.
How It Works
The TLR Portrait Sharpener uses the Photoshop CS3/CS4 Smart Filter feature. There's a little known property of Smart Filter layers. The layer can have a blend mode. So can the individual filters.
What this means is that one layer does the job of three layers:
- Unsharp Mask filter (USM) is used to sharpen the darker contours along edges.
- Highpass filter sharpening is used for overall sharpening of edges and surfaces.
- Median filter is applied with a Lighten blend to soften skin surfaces.
You're left with one layer, not three. The opacity is set to 65%, which makes it easy to adjust the effect without altering the filter settings. Blend If sliders protect the extreme highlights and shadows. A Luminosity layer blend avoids color shifts. And, because the action uses the Smart Filter feature, you can easily adjust the filter settings, making the effect easily customizable.
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The portrait sharpener
Super action Glen, just been experimenting and it's very subtle but effective, thanks for all your efforts. I'm not sure I've 'rated' it correctly, I clicked on the star corresponding to 'great' in case it appears as something else! Ruth
Ruth Brown, avid photographer and wild about nature macro
Re. The portrait sharpener
Thanks, Ruth.
You ended up with 4 stars, that's for great! Five stars is for awesome. So it looks like you did it right.
You can make the effect stronger just by increasing the Opacity slider for the layer. The action sets it at 65%. I did that to make it easy to adjust the effect.
If you still need a stronger effect, you can double-click on any of the filter effects and adjust the filter settings.
If you or anyone else comes up with better settings, please pass them along. I'll try them and maybe post an updated version.
I put this together in an hour or so and tested it on just a couple of photographs. I figured I'd let the user community help me refine the settings.
I'm glad you posted a comment. Comments here will keep the discussion organized, so I can learn from the feedback.
Glad youi like it.
Portrait Sharpener
Ran this on a few portraits and it's a really nice effect. Stuff like this makes my life way easier and makes me look a lot smarter.
Before/After Comparison for TLR Portrait Sharpener
The forum link below has before/after sample photos that show the full effect when you use (2) capture sharpening in something like Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, or one of the TLR actions or scripts, (2) followed by the TLR Landscape Sharpener, (3) and then Web output sharpening.
http://www.thelightsright.com/smf/index.php?topic=24.0
Version 1.0b Posted for TLR Portait Sharpener
Changes: