I use Nik Silver Effex Pro as well and while it is too bad there is no 64-bit version I don't miss that so much since it can be used directly from Lightroom.
I have selected it as an external editor in the preferences so I can just right click on an image and select Edit in->Silver Effex Pro from the context menu.
charles.K wrote:
Another contrast/sharpening improving technique in PS, is using the unsharp mask, is setting the amount to 20 or less, radius to 80 to 70, counter-intuitive as it may be, but works very well. This tip is from one of the guru's of PS.
I also quite like SilverFX. There are quite a few techniques posted on BW conversions. One particularly interesting was posted rather some time ago on FM but I am unable to find it...
Before SilverFX I was using channel mixer.
charles.K wrote:
Another contrast/sharpening improving technique in PS, is using the unsharp mask, is setting the amount to 20 or less, radius to 80 to 70, counter-intuitive as it may be, but works very well. This tip is from one of the guru's of PS.
Yes, that gives pictures a real punch. My set is from 15/25 (little punch) to 15/200 (big punch).
If you haven't read up on luminosity masking, saturation masking and other similar methods, Tony Kuyper offers some outstanding tutorials. Link
Using this can give very precise controls on contrast with excellent blending. If using these masks for curve adjustments, leaving a layer in normal blending mode will increase saturation. Putting the layer in luminosity blend mode ensures that you only touch the contrast while leaving the saturation toned down.
Some additional things I notice people tend to overlook is using hue adjustments within HSL to shift segments of color. For instance digital sensors tend to capture greens with a bit of red, but not much blue and the resulting greens, while probably accurate don't have the brilliant clarity of velvia. Using hue on green can allow you to swing the greens from warmer to cooler tones. It works well on red-orange values as well to build clarity in the colors.
White balance was mentioned previously, but I learned in scanning film to work another way. In curves and through selective color you can clean up colors by learning the relations between CMYK and RGB.
+Red = -Cyan
+Green = -Magenta
+Blue = -Yellow
And vice versa. Using this method, you can warm up particular tonal ranges of images. Maybe you want warmer mid-tones while keeping cooler shadows and white clouds. Pin the ends of the red and blue curves and add some red in the middle and subtract some blue in the middle. You can combine this with a mask technique to get even more control.
I think I read something about crashes with the new version in the PP & Printing forum. It's best to ask your question there (if the info isn't already there).
I find many of the sharpening descriptions as noted above tend to produce far too many sharpening artifacts. I think many are, oft-times, too aggressive, especially when they're combined with crushed blacks and excessive contrast tweaking.
Step-sharpening can bring out some detail that a straight resize may lose, but the image can also start looking funky if you perform too many resize steps.
Is anyone using Capture One Pro? It seems everyone uses Photoshop and Lightroom yet I hardly ever use PS anymore since Capture One Pro 6. You can do a huge amount during the RAW conversion stage negating the need to use PS to some degree. I try to avoid PS as much as possible anyway (can't be avoided for lots of things like resizing/sharpening, maybe dust removal although you can do that in C1PRO too) so it suits me just fine to do virtually everything during RAW conversion, including split toning. Each to their own I suppose.
Just saying that Capture One is a pretty powerful RAW converter that lets you do a lot of "Post Processing" sort of before you get to the post processing stage.
JohnJ wrote:
Is anyone using Capture One Pro? It seems everyone uses Photoshop and Lightroom yet I hardly ever use PS anymore since Capture One Pro 6. You can do a huge amount during the RAW conversion stage negating the need to use PS to some degree. I try to avoid PS as much as possible anyway (can't be avoided for lots of things like resizing/sharpening, maybe dust removal although you can do that in C1PRO too) so it suits me just fine to do virtually everything during RAW conversion, including split toning. Each to their own I suppose.
Just saying that Capture One is a pretty powerful RAW converter that lets you do a lot of "Post Processing" sort of before you get to the post processing stage.
i fooled around with both capture one and aperture and actually like the output from both of them better than lightroom (note: i don't shoot canon which may impact this preference). the convenience and speed of workflow and transparency (and efficiency) in file storage made me stick with lightroom though. i never use photoshop except for resizing/sharpening and creating stitches. incidentally, lightroom also has an easy dust spot removal function.
I use Aperture for library management and image adjustments, and like it in general, but I'm not happy with the results using Aperture to export for web-sized downscaled images. Aperture is not good at squeezing the maximum amount of perceptual detail into a small image, and offers no control over the details of the downsizing process.
What I have found works very well is ImageMagick, an open-source command-line driven image manipulation program. ImageMagick appeals to my inner computer nerd: it takes a some effort to learn the necessary arcane settings, but once you know how to use it, you have extremely fine control over all the internal details of the image resizing algorithm, which are usually not (easily) user-settable in other programs (requiring more complicated multi-step resizing procedures). My typical web-resizing command looks like convert in.jpg -quality 98% -interlace line -filter gaussian -define filter:support=0.50 -resize 800x800 out.jpg
which produces a much better result than what I get with Aperture. I've never felt the need for multi-stage resizing routines; I think with ImageMagick you have enough control over the process to get the right results all in one step; however, the command-line driven interface also makes it easy to chain several steps together if so desired.
JohnJ wrote:
Is anyone using Capture One Pro? It seems everyone uses Photoshop and Lightroom yet I hardly ever use PS anymore since Capture One Pro 6. You can do a huge amount during the RAW conversion stage negating the need to use PS to some degree. I try to avoid PS as much as possible anyway (can't be avoided for lots of things like resizing/sharpening, maybe dust removal although you can do that in C1PRO too) so it suits me just fine to do virtually everything during RAW conversion, including split toning. Each to their own I suppose.
Just saying that Capture One is a pretty powerful RAW converter that lets you do a lot of "Post Processing" sort of before you get to the post processing stage.
I used Capture One for awhile because the colors were just smoother and more real for me with my leica. Then, I shot film for awhile and went back to Lr catalog feature and just used Ps to play with my film scans.
Now that I have another digital leica back in my hand, I found myself back to Capture One again. The colors. I played with Aperture 3 for bit, really loved the RGB curves, but it was just too slow. I am running on a SSD and it was still painful at times. Lr seems to be the fastest but I think I am really going to stick with Capture One this time and really "learn it."
My biggest thing with it is getting a good workflow going. For example, in Lightroom, you may import a card and file it away never to edit the photos again. Only when you stumble across them later you realize, wow, that looks nasty. With capture one, it somewhat forces me to cull from import and then editing to filing the photos away. I know that may seem small but it works.
I too would like to avoid Ps and capture one helps me do this. I have a few scripts I like to run in Ps but I think I can get buy without them. I just wish D&B was better in all of these programs.
"I find many of the sharpening descriptions as noted above tend to produce far too many sharpening artifacts. I think many are, oft-times, too aggressive, especially when they're combined with crushed blacks and excessive contrast tweaking."
+1
It is a good way to have an image noticed online - strong immediate visual impact.
I agree with the above, some people actually seem to love to oversharpen their images. For my 5D files, I have adopted a dumbed down step sharpen technique where I just sharpen at full size and then smart sharpen twice with 0.1 radius at final size. I use a layer mask so that I'm only sharpening the necessary parts and not OOF parts, to leave the bokeh untouched, and I mask any sharpening artifacts.
I mind shots oversharpened with the step sharpen scripts less than images that are oversharpened with a large radius (obvious halos), and images that are not sharpened after resizing are often blurry so I hate looking at them.
kakomu wrote:
I find many of the sharpening descriptions as noted above tend to produce far too many sharpening artifacts. I think many are, oft-times, too aggressive, especially when they're combined with crushed blacks and excessive contrast tweaking.
The solution I take for overly aggressive sharpening tools (and they all are in my opinion!) is, at least in the case of Photoshop, to do a fade operation after. This allows you to see and compare before and after as well as adjust the affects of the tool to suit each image. Here's my script as it is today:
This might make an informative comparison:
If someone has a nice, detailed, minimally-PP'd full-size image that they can post a link to here, and then everyone else can apply their favorite downsizing/PP method on the same image (or set of a few images) to the same target size (e.g. within 800x800) and post the results in this thread. Let's see how these different workflows look! I'll try to dig up some sample image tomorrow morning if no one else has posted one to work on by then.
 for each image individually and on the fly. And, at no time is any one tool overly aggressive. It's also easy to cancel a fade thus stopping the script and make a selection if there's some part you want sharpened selectively and then continue the script after the selective operation is done and the selection is deselected. <br />
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<br><br>Edited on May 04, 2011 at 12:42 AM · <a style='text-decoration:none' target='_blank' href='/forum/viewedits.php?mid=9555749&page=3'>View previous versions</a></span></span><!--%startbox%--><!--%fmLike%--><!--%endbox%--><br /><!--%divend%-->
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May 04, 2011 at 12:29 AM