sharpen with bilateral blur

[hanshab]

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

[maXemaeLean]

This is one of the coolest sharpening methods I ever saw!.. and IMO gives by far the nicest results in A\Photo.

Until you posted this (last year) I was quite unhappy with Photo's 'sharpening-abilities' ... you changed that. 😃

So I just want to say: Thank you very! much! for sharing this!!

[EGODRACO1989]

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

[Alfred]

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.

[DM1]

@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.

[p_mac]

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

Edited March 3, 2021 by p_mac

[DM1]

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. 🙂

[p_mac]

7 hours ago, DM1 said:

Much appreciated p_mac. It works great. 🙂

Glad it worked out for you 

[tsehov]

Thank You hanshab for this great macro. I have now tried it with very many images, and I have to say it really does fine job.