Hello Jeff,
Thanks for the reply, which in many ways was exactly what I had anticipated. As I mentioned, I came across HP Sharpening again in The Digital Negative(1st edition, second one on order) and decided to do a bit of digging. For many years I've been using your PhotoKit Sharpener, mostly for output but also capture when necessary, and have always been very satisfied with the results. One of my customers uses the High Pass method but I've mentioned to him on several occasions that he is overdoing it, too many halos.
Hi Gary,
High-pass filters are usually not edge aware, and will thus create halos near high contrast edges, unless also edge masking is used, althought that can require a multilayered approach which adds to the file size. However, there is another unwanted side-effect of changing brightnesses of RGB colors, and this is color and saturation shifts that the layered approach does not automatically handle. I don't know how critical that is for your (customer's) kind of images, but halos and color shifts can be totally avoided with better tools. Since I've discovered
Topaz Labs Detail, I've not seen anything as effective and powerful since. The price can also hardly be prohibitive, since they offer free updates
and upgrades for life.
It's not only a useful tool for Creative sharpening, but also for output sharpening. It can be called from many host programs that support Photoshop Plugins, so one has a lot of flexibility to integrate into ones current or future workflow. It can also use presets, and they adapt to the size of the image, so the same preset can be reused for various output sizes.
Cheers,
Bart