Digital Light & Color

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For the nature/landscape photography I prefer, I like to use multiple and sequential High Pass sharpening at various blur radius to increase contrasts for small, medium, and large image area details but miss the light/dark Halo controls that other PWP7 sharpening transforms have.

At present I use a sequential PWP7 *.wfl but cannot incorporate a Halo control until after the *.wfl process using Composite-Blend with an original image and the workflow output image and a Halo control mask.

Would it be useful to others to have a High Pass sharpening transform for PWP8?

More detail as to what I do currently:
High Pass sharpening, single or multiple passes used for:
...1) small detail [adjustable 1 to 5 Blur radius, perhaps 3],
...2) medium detail [adjustable 5 to 15 blur radius, perhaps 10], and
...3) local contrast enhancement [adjustable 15 or greater blur radius, perhaps 40]
At present, preferred sequence for multiple passes is 2), 1), and finally 3).

Proposed: High Pass sharpening with light/dark Halo control; 0 to 100 Threshold; 0 to 256 Blur Radius; Composite Soft Light or Hard Light blending; and optional Luminance channel High Pass with Soft or Hard Light blending to avoid color changes.

A Single-Pass Manual work flow steps using PWP7…
Img0 = starting image
...1) Click on Img0 and open the Blur-High Pass transform creating “Img1-RGBcolor” with preferred settings. Option: Extract Img0’s Luminance channel and create a preferred Blur-High Pass image version, “Img1-Luminance”. Perhaps for medium detail: Amount = 100; Threshold = 100; and Radius = 10.
...2) Click on either Img1 versions and open/lower-left Apply Add a Mask Tool-Brightness stair step Curve [0,0] [50,0] [50,100] [100,100]… …click OK or leave mask ‘active’. Mask white = light Halo amount control and Mask black = dark Halo amount control.
...3) Click on Img0 and open Composite-Soft Light or Hard Light where: Input = Img0, Input Amount Mask = the resulting 2) mask; Overlay = either Img1 versions. Perhaps Input Mask white Amount = 20; Input Mask black Amount = 100; Overlay Amount = 50; and Operation = Hard Light, often preferring Soft Light depending upon desired ambience.
...4) Adjust the Composite transform settings to preference while monitoring an updating Preview. Click Apply or OK.
...5) Click on the resulting 4) image and repeat 1) through 4), if preferred, selecting a different High Pass blur radius in step 1).

…den…

As it happens, PWP 8.0 implements up to 3 passes of bilinear sharpening. Each pass has its own radius, threshold, etc.

It turns out I had already implemented this for 7.x, but Kiril and I never managed to merge our code to make a release.

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I am looking forward to the additional features to Bilateral Sharpen...

...in the meantime, I continue to achieve preference with standby High Pass sharpening techniques with variations.

Not described above is an option that combines High Pass sharpening for both Medium and Small detail in one High Pass image version...

This option is described in a tutorial here: http://www.l7.org/IMAGEs_by_DEN/tutoria ... arpen.html. The tutorial has a slightly different workflow then described in the original post. A Mouse On and Off example is also illustrated.

...den...