LBHR Layer Blended Halo Reduction Sharpening Action Lonestardigital’s Adobe Photoshop based Lab Color / Lightness Channel Layer Blended Halo Reduction Sharpening Action produces halo-free sharp pictures with a single keystroke. This is a free action for Lonestardigital readers. Click here to jump to the download page. Before After Sharpening halos before LBHR After LBHR I designed the LBHR Sharpening Action with one purpose in mind: To produce sharp, halo-free, high quality pictures from straight-out-of-the-camera images with minimum additional input & effort on the part of the photographer. Using normally sharpened Jpegs straight from the camera plus the LBHR sharpening action in Photoshop CS2 has cut my photo processing time down to about one-third of the time it took when I processed every picture via Raw conversion. I’m now using Jpegs as primary, Raw as backup & archive files. Simply put, using normal in-camera sharpening, the LBHR Action produces the quality of sharpness that I think the camera should have done in the first place. Natural, high quality filmlike sharpness without an overprocessed look. Highlights: * LBHR works equally well on Jpeg, Tiff, or Raw converted files. * Requires Adobe Photoshop 5, 6, 7, CS, or CS2. (Windows or Mac). * Single keystroke sharpening action requires no additional input*. *Advanced Photoshop users can easily modify sharpening input values. * LBHR has been personally tested on full-sized images taken with normal in-camera sharpening from Nikon.
http://www.lonestardigital.com/
Travel-photography blog dsphotographic.com has instructions on removing pesky tourists from your otherwise album-worthy photos–and without long, agonizing clone-stamp sessions. The trick involves taking multiple, tripod-mounted shots of the same scene, the idea being that as people move around, the spots they occupy later become “empty.” You can then use Photoshop’s layers tool to cover “new” people with those empty spots. The tutorial provides step-by-step instructions, complete with example photos. Brilliant! The next time you’re visiting some historic landmark or natural wonder, put this method to the test. The results are dazzling. It’s worth noting, too, that you don’t necessarily need Photoshop; any image-editing program that supports layers will do. Everybody’s open-source favorite, GIMP, should do the trick. Thanks, Dhanushka! — Rick Broida How to Remove Tourists From Your Photos [dsphotographic.com]
Not everyone should download and install CS3 without giving it a lot of thought. Those with extensive plug ins and those who do not need any of the new features of CS3 should think long and hard about downloading CS3 A brief survey of the new features can be found at:
http://www.photoshopuser.com/cs3/sk_features.html
Here’s a video link from Photoshop TV that’s great!
http://www.photoshoptv.com/play/
Are any of these features going to be helpful to your workflow? If so, no use in approaching with fear–just use caution If you are a wedding and portrait pro, you very likely will find many of these features useful to speeding up and making postprocessing less of a chore So far, I have been lucky. I have encountered only a few problems after working with CS3 over the weekend; I really like it; I even went back to CS2 just out of curiosity to see what effect CS3 had on CS2 and CS2 worked well even after installing CS3 Likely CS2 is history for me, I am adopting CS3 and have found no reason to go back But CS3 is not for everyone! Think before you act!
