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Creative Sharpening – Control Halo & Line Separately


Digital sharpening produces its affects by accentuating contrast, both of texture and of contour. The accentuation of contrast along contours is produced by creating both a dark line and a light halo. While the filters used to sharpen images, such as Unsharp Mask or High Pass, don’t offer independent control of the light and dark components of a contour, you can control them separately using layers. It will take two layers to separate halo from line; one for the halo and one for the line. Filter the two layers differently to produce different thicknesses (Radius) and intensities (Amount) of halos/lines. Then, you can use the Blend If sliders of layers to specifically target either high or low values by moving either the shadows (black triangle) or highlights (white triangle) sliders of This Layer, making those values no longer visible. Some people like to set the Opacity of these two layers to 50% before filtration, so that they can conveniently readjust the intensity of the affect, moving the opacity slider up to make it stronger or down to make it weaker. If you do this too, remember that only the filter’s Radius setting can adjust the thickness of the contours it produces.


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3 Ways You Can Help Stop PIPA / SOPA


PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
In the largest online protest in history, more than 7000 websites including Google,  Wikipedia,  and WordPress are protesting PIPA / SOPA today.
1   Find out more and sign the SOPA strike petition here.
2   Visit FightForThe Future.org to email your representative in congress.
3   Make your voice heard by signing the Google online petition
“PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”
The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.”

Target Image Contours With Edge Masks



Edge masks target only the contours in an image. (Think of edge masks in Photoshop as the creative sharpening equivalent to the Masking slider in ACR or Lightroom’s capture sharpening.) They keep smooth areas smooth, while accentuating the contrast/sharpness of contours. They can be particularly useful for images that contain moderate to significant amounts of noise. In many cases, they allow the use of more aggressive applications of sharpening effects. Edge masks can help you take all of the creative sharpening effects you design up a notch – or two.


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High Pass Sharpening

No High Pass sharpening

Low Radius High Pass sharpening

High Radius High Pass sharpening

There are three methods of sharpening in Photoshop that we should all be aware of: Luminance, Edge and High Pass sharpening. In this order, the three methods become progressively more complex and go to greater lengths to reduce the accentuation of noise.


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