Interesting uses of unsharp mask

GlennChan wrote on 6/18/2006, 3:22 PM

I just finished an article/tutorial on the unsharp mask filter in Vegas. It goes over the basic parameters of the filter and interesting uses of it:
-enhancing resolution
-drawing focus to areas
-soft focus effect all on one track/event
-chroma crawl reduction

Article/tutorial here

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 6/18/2006, 5:00 PM

Excellent tutorial, and very useful to me. I didn't know a lot of the things you presented. Thanks!

eyethoughtso wrote on 6/18/2006, 6:19 PM

I liked the colored letters in the titles of the books. Was that an intended effect?

Jeff

GlennChan wrote on 6/18/2006, 6:36 PM

Thanks John.

MVP: Nope.

Serena wrote on 6/18/2006, 7:40 PM

Good stuff. Use unsharp masking a lot in processing astronomical CCD images and not surprisingly it has been my choice in Vegas. Hadn't thought of the soft focus use. In your VASST turorial on colour correction Spot seemed to prefer the ordinary sharpening filter, but didn't explain why. Unsharp masking is more sophisticated, so can you comment?

GlennChan wrote on 6/18/2006, 8:36 PM

You're talking about the training DVD right?

The unsharp mask is definitely another way to sharpen an image. I haven't looked that deeply into it, but the algorithm is different and the render times slightly longer. Johnmeyer did a comparison of render times. The unsharp mask filter may provide slightly better results than the convolution kernel. But I haven't looked into it that deeply.

Serena wrote on 6/18/2006, 10:25 PM

Yes, the training DVD. I'd expect longer render times but that's not really an issue unless many clips are involved. Certainly in astronomy the unsharp mask is far superior.