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sharpen with bilateral blur


hanshab

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Sharpen with Bilateral Blur

Here is a sharpening technique I learned from Calvin Hollywood.  He does this in Photoshop.  He calls it Freaky Amazing Details. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV9u0Wu8L0M

It creates a group of a duplicated pixel layer and sets the group to blend mode overlay.  Because the macro capability of Affinity Photo is not extensive enough, I had to find a workaround to his approach to include the base and duplicated pixel layer into a group.  He then sets the group to overlay blend mode.  Then the top child layer blend mode is set to vivid light blend mode and the layer inverted.  Then he applies Surface Blur to the layer which is the same as Bilateral Blur in Affinity Photo. Bilateral Blur is an edge preserving blur filter that also reduces noise and graininess.  The radius determines the area size and the threshold addresses the tone values of adjacent pixels used in the equation. It determines how much deviation is required form the pixel being modified in order to include it in the blur operation. Keep the threshold around 7-10 and radius between 5-12.  The macro does a merge visible of the result as I don’t want to keep multiple copies of pixel layers to save space on disc. You can delete the working layers if you wish. I like this approach because it does not create the halos that unsharp mask and high pass often creates and you can sharpen pretty intensively without seeing artifacts. However, when driving the parameters high you can run into the several artifacts:  intensity plateaus that lead to images appearing like cartoons or introduction of false edges so don’t drive the adjustable parameters too high. Note that the bilateral blur filter is very computationally intensive.

You can find the definition of bilateral blur here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilateral_filter

sharpen with blur.afmacro

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22 minutes ago, EGODRACO1989 said:

it's a very cool input, but I can't load the macro 😭

You need to import it via the Macros panel, not the Library panel.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.5.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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@hanshabCould you possibly provide an iPad version (macros) export via macro library? Love to try it on the iPad version as I no longer have desktop pc.

M1 IPad Air 10.9/256GB   lpadOS 17.1.1 Apple Pencil (2nd gen).
Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Affinity Design 1.10.5 
Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and betas.

Official Online iPad Help documents (multi-lingual) here: https://affinity.https://affinity.help/ 

 

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9 hours ago, DM1 said:

@hanshabCould you possibly provide an iPad version (macros) export via macro library? Love to try it on the iPad version as I no longer have desktop pc.

Hey DM1, here is the macro I wrote for my Mac but works as well on my iPad.  For some reason I couldn’t upload the one from hanshab so I viewed the vid he referenced and wrote one myself, then exported into my iPad   

My Macros.afmacros

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1 hour ago, p_mac said:

I viewed the vid he referenced and wrote one myself, then exported into my iPad   

Much appreciated p_mac. It works great. 🙂

M1 IPad Air 10.9/256GB   lpadOS 17.1.1 Apple Pencil (2nd gen).
Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Affinity Design 1.10.5 
Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and betas.

Official Online iPad Help documents (multi-lingual) here: https://affinity.https://affinity.help/ 

 

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