This is the original sharpening action set from The Light's Right Studio: a Photoshop action set that make it easy to obtain professional sharpening of your digital images. TLR Sharpening Toolkit is a Photoshop CS action set for sharpening RGB, CMYK, L*a*b, and monochrome images.

(If you run Photoshop CS3/CS4, I suggest you instead download the TLR Professional Sharpening Actions collection. This collection is intended to previous versions of Photoshop.)

The recommended workflow is three-pass sharpening. The first pass should be done right after RAW conversion with one of the Capture Sharpening actions. 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.

Capture sharpening is usually best done with a layer mask to limit the effect to the edges in an image. TLR Sharpening Toolkit gives you three options for the edge mask: luminosity boundaries, color boundaries, and enhanced boundaries that merge luminosity and color boundaries. The enhanced edge mask will likely give you the most well-defined edge mask.

You can use Highpass Filter or USM sharpening. Highpass Filter sharpening uses an Overlay blend. You can change the layer blend to Soft Light for a softer effect or Hard Light for a stronger effect. There are two USM choices: Single Contour and Dual Contour. Single contour uses a Luminosity blend. Dual contour provides for separate sharpening of light and dark pixels. The Dark Contour uses a Darken blend. The Light Contour uses a Lighten
blend.

Capture sharpening is limited to the midtones with Blend If settings.

The second pass is optional. It is called "Creative Sharpening." 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 Highpass Filter 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 third pass is output sharpening. You can choose from Highpass Filter or USM sharpening with Luminosity or Overlay blend respectively. Output sharpening is global, except for the extreme highlights and shadows, which are protected with Blend If settings.

You will also find a set of actions for 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. Having separate actions for edges and surfaces allows you to apply more aggressive sharpening to the edges and less aggressive
sharpening to the surfaces.

The available actions include the following:

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