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LinearSharpen 2.1 and LinearAction 2.1 out

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Hi Pekka,

Your work in this area is much appreciated, and I'll try out this new action shortly.

One question:

I find that customizing unsharp mask according to the image has been extremely helpful in getting good final results, and this seems to be a near universal conclusion.

I understand that you provide a linear conversion tool which doesn't do the sharpening, but your explanation strongly suggests how doing the sharpening as part of the linear conversion process would be preferable.

Does your action vary the sharpening according to the image, or is a standard amount applied regardless of the image?

Any other thoughts on the apparent conflict between incorporating the sharpening during the linear conversion and customizing the amount of sharpening according to the specific image?

Also, what about the idea that applying unsharp mask should generally be done last, after all other adjustments have been done. I'd imagine that I'd still be doing some adjustments of curves and levels on my images, even using your linear action, since they're not all perfectly exposed to begin with.

Thanks!

Don
http://www.dlcphotography.net
Pekka Saarinen said:
http://www.photography-on-the.net/D30/linear/

Better (more accurate, more saturated with much more headroom)
colors. No external ICC profiles needed. Mac and PC download
available. Needs Photoshop 6 to run.

Free for all.

--
Pekka
http://photography-on-the.net
Click to expand...
 
Thanks Pekka. Great work.

Hope I see more pictures of my country (Portugal) in your inspiring site! :-)
--Rui Faria
 
I have the same questions as Don. I would add an additional question: When would you resize the image the image; before or after running linearsharpen?
DonCohen said:
Your work in this area is much appreciated, and I'll try out this
new action shortly.

One question:

I find that customizing unsharp mask according to the image has
been extremely helpful in getting good final results, and this
seems to be a near universal conclusion.

I understand that you provide a linear conversion tool which
doesn't do the sharpening, but your explanation strongly suggests
how doing the sharpening as part of the linear conversion process
would be preferable.

Does your action vary the sharpening according to the image, or is
a standard amount applied regardless of the image?

Any other thoughts on the apparent conflict between incorporating
the sharpening during the linear conversion and customizing the
amount of sharpening according to the specific image?

Also, what about the idea that applying unsharp mask should
generally be done last, after all other adjustments have been done.
I'd imagine that I'd still be doing some adjustments of curves and
levels on my images, even using your linear action, since they're
not all perfectly exposed to begin with.

Thanks!

Don
http://www.dlcphotography.net
Pekka Saarinen said:
http://www.photography-on-the.net/D30/linear/

Better (more accurate, more saturated with much more headroom)
colors. No external ICC profiles needed. Mac and PC download
available. Needs Photoshop 6 to run.

Free for all.

--
Pekka
http://photography-on-the.net
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I'm still getting neon reds. I'm not convinced about the benefits of linear tif files. I shot a candy apple red tulip and it comes out tinted orange with Miranda's conversion and neon red with Pekka's action. It actually looks better taken in jpg fine mode!-- http://www.jackzucker.com
 
I think it really depends of the photo. The first one I tried was a really improvement. It was not the same for the second one.
I don't use to like when sharpening is included. I prefer to do it after
Nicole
Jack A. Zucker said:
I'm still getting neon reds. I'm not convinced about the benefits
of linear tif files. I shot a candy apple red tulip and it comes
out tinted orange with Miranda's conversion and neon red with
Pekka's action. It actually looks better taken in jpg fine mode!
--
http://www.jackzucker.com
Click to expand...
 
Thanks Pekka!

I used the draft mode of Linear Sharpen 2.1 and I'm very pleased with the out of the box simplicity.

Sample:



Regards,

Ian Schutt
 
Jack A. Zucker said:
I'm still getting neon reds. I'm not convinced about the benefits
of linear tif files. I shot a candy apple red tulip and it comes
out tinted orange with Miranda's conversion and neon red with
Pekka's action. It actually looks better taken in jpg fine mode!
--
http://www.jackzucker.com
Click to expand...
Hi Jack,

In my experiments my action makes the tint of color red ok, but sometimes I can be very saturated in D30. So if you go to
Image menu -> Adjust menu -> Hue/saturation

dialog in Photoshop after conversion, and select "Reds" from the dropdown menu, and then adjust there "Lightness" slider to something between -10 to -20 I'm sure you'll start getting what you want. Other option is to adjust Reds' Saturation slider to -10 and Reds' Lightness slider to -5.

This red oversaturation seems to happen mostly with dim light, and with artificial lighting when you "boost" current light level with longer exposuse or bigger aperture - I'll have to investigate it a bit when I have time.

Hope this helps,

Pekka
--Pekka http://photography-on-the.net
 
Pekka;

I'll add my thanks to everyone else's. The updated routines are excellent.

A question: some of the routines have multiple Hue/Saturation adjustments, most of which appear to be neutral. Why is this?

James
Pekka Saarinen said:
Better (more accurate, more saturated with much more headroom)
colors. No external ICC profiles needed. Mac and PC download
available. Needs Photoshop 6 to run.

Free for all.--James
Click to expand...
 
DonCohen said:
Hi Pekka,

Your work in this area is much appreciated, and I'll try out this
new action shortly.
Click to expand...
Thanks!
Member said:
One question:

I find that customizing unsharp mask according to the image has
been extremely helpful in getting good final results, and this
seems to be a near universal conclusion.

I understand that you provide a linear conversion tool which
doesn't do the sharpening, but your explanation strongly suggests
how doing the sharpening as part of the linear conversion process
would be preferable.
Click to expand...
In short, USM works better in linear mode. The theory behind this with some demonstrations can be found in "Gamma Induced Errors" section of http://www.aim-dtp.net . Sharpening in linear does not produce light halos and it works without artifacts on very detailed data and very strong sharpening (i.e. it keeps the image looking more natural). I use USM in "half linear" mode (between conversion curves), which I've found out to be a good compromise as fully linear sharpening is sometimes too effective (makes strong black halos if used even a bit too strongly) and also the D30's inherent jaggyness problem in curves in not so pronounced this way.
Member said:
Does your action vary the sharpening according to the image, or is
a standard amount applied regardless of the image?
Click to expand...
The "draft" version inside LS does only overall USM, and the other versions use masked USM sharpening with small overall USM.
Member said:
Any other thoughts on the apparent conflict between incorporating
the sharpening during the linear conversion and customizing the
amount of sharpening according to the specific image?
Click to expand...
The action has "adjust all" version when you have set all parameters. If you see that you use certain parameters for each photo you could copy the action and fix those settings for a customised version (I'll give you instructions if you don't know how to edit actions).
Member said:
Also, what about the idea that applying unsharp mask should
generally be done last, after all other adjustments have been done.
I'd imagine that I'd still be doing some adjustments of curves and
levels on my images, even using your linear action, since they're
not all perfectly exposed to begin with.
Click to expand...
I do LinearSharpen and the set levels dialog if needed. The good thing about the version 2.1 is that its colors keep their tint very well even if you change levels and gamma. If you need to do curves you can use the "adjust all" version of the action and adjust the last curve by hand (or save and load curves there).

If you need to do cloning or other type of retouching work, you could use Fred's old linear ICC to bring the image to brigher level during editing (that is if you can find the profile: it seems Fred has taken it from distribution). The easy solution for all this would be using curves in Photoshop's Adjustment Layers, but sadly they don't work in 16-bit mode - I really hope that PS 6.5 will fix that.

Cheers,

Pekka
--Pekka http://photography-on-the.net
 
James Knowles said:
Pekka;

I'll add my thanks to everyone else's. The updated routines are
excellent.

A question: some of the routines have multiple Hue/Saturation
adjustments, most of which appear to be neutral. Why is this?
Click to expand...
Thanks James,

They are not neutral steps, their settings are there under separate color selection dropdowns.

Pekka
--Pekka http://photography-on-the.net
 
Pekka Saarinen said:
http://www.photography-on-the.net/D30/linear/

Better (more accurate, more saturated with much more headroom)
colors. No external ICC profiles needed. Mac and PC download
available. Needs Photoshop 6 to run.

Free for all.
Click to expand...
Hi

i have been using Linearsharpen and linearaction 2.0 since they were released and i thought they can never improve further :)

thanks for the great work!!!

--Red Dawn
 
BDF said:
I have the same questions as Don. I would add an additional
question: When would you resize the image the image; before or
after running linearsharpen?
Click to expand...
Hi BDF,

Really needs some testing to decide...

If you do resizing after LS, don't do LS too strongly because you need to sharpen it a bit after resize (strong cumulative sharpening does not usually look good)

If you do resizing before LS, run the "full" setup version of LS where you can adjust USM levels to suit the smaller size photo (the settings are now good for full size D30 shots and are too strong for small ones). Problem with small ones is that clean strong sharpening boosts also visibility of the jaggyness.

For example, for 33% size photo I'd use something like:
First USM to 70%, second USM to 40%

Pekka

--Pekka http://photography-on-the.net
 
Pekka Saarinen said:
This red oversaturation seems to happen mostly with dim light, and
with artificial lighting when you "boost" current light level with
longer exposuse or bigger aperture - I'll have to investigate it a
bit when I have time.

Hope this helps,
Click to expand...
In this case, the lighting was artificial. It was from a Photogenic studio flash unit with the camera's white balance set to flash. The color on the LCD looks correct but your action yields a more neon-like rendition. I have used the selective color to get closer to the actual color but I'm still fine tuning. The lighting in this case is not dim and in fact was metered carefully using a sekonic L-508 flash meter and bracketed 2/3 under and 2/3 over exposed. All 3 images do not reproduce properly using linear tif files and the miranda or pekka conversions. The pekka conversion looks better and closer than the miranda conversion in this case which converts the candy-apple red to an orange tint. It may be difficult to get a single action which looks good for skin-tones and highly saturated flowers or other colorful subjects...

Jaz
-- http://www.jackzucker.com
 
Hi,

I would like to know what is the rule to set the levels when the image is desaturated. For part of my images on test I need to adjust levels because the image is a little bit washed out
Thanks
Nicole
 
Rui Faria said:
Thanks Pekka. Great work.

Hope I see more pictures of my country (Portugal) in your inspiring
site! :-)
Click to expand...
Hi Rui,

Thanks!

I'm planning a new trip there. What's the best season for countryside photography (I especially liked cork trees and countryside scenery. I was actually quite depressed to drive past beautiful scenery on motorway at 180km/h many times - sometimes my family does not understand the word "stop" :)

Pekka
--Pekka http://photography-on-the.net
 
I had tried using a 10 to 15 shift towards Cyan in Color Balance and worked nice, but Pekka's method outlined below works better overall as no worrying with the three separate shadow-mid-hilight selections in CB.

A great improvement on something that was already an excellent tool as version 1.

Thanks, again, Pekka!
Pekka Saarinen said:
Jack A. Zucker said:
I'm still getting neon reds. I'm not convinced about the benefits
of linear tif files. I shot a candy apple red tulip and it comes
out tinted orange with Miranda's conversion and neon red with
Pekka's action. It actually looks better taken in jpg fine mode!
--
http://www.jackzucker.com
Click to expand...
Hi Jack,

In my experiments my action makes the tint of color red ok, but
sometimes I can be very saturated in D30. So if you go to
Image menu -> Adjust menu -> Hue/saturation
dialog in Photoshop after conversion, and select "Reds" from the
dropdown menu, and then adjust there "Lightness" slider to
something between -10 to -20 I'm sure you'll start getting what you
want. Other option is to adjust Reds' Saturation slider to -10 and
Reds' Lightness slider to -5.

This red oversaturation seems to happen mostly with dim light, and
with artificial lighting when you "boost" current light level with
longer exposuse or bigger aperture - I'll have to investigate it a
bit when I have time.
Click to expand...
 
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