I am trying to duplicate a technique described by Janko Williams. You can find it on his blog, http://jankowilliams.wordpress.com/. Scroll down to the topic, "A Look Dissected."
The steps are:
After you retouch everything the way you would any other project duplicate your retouched layer twice. Run the high pass filter on one pretty heavy, the exact amount varies by the size of your image...
Once thats done, go ahead and desaturate the layer completely. On the second duplicated layer run high pass again but this time much much less just a few pixels max:
Set them both to overlay blending mode
I tried this using "Soft Light" instead of "Overlay" and the result looks similar to his. So am I right in concluding Soft Light in PWP is the same as Overlay in PS?
Don't confuse the Composite transform's Overlay image with PS's 'Overlay blending'. For the workflow described in the reference link, you are using two HighPass filter images, one for with a large radius blur for 'Local Contrast Enhancement' and one with a small radius blur for edge enhancement....
...Because the HighPass images are centered about the 50% tone, when used in PWP's Composite transform... the transform's Operation needs to be set to either Softlight [most often] or Hardlight [rarely] where the HighPass image is the Overlay image and the Input image is the 'starting image' or image to be transformed...
I will normally use this process for Landscape/Seascape images with lots of small detail but have not necessarily applied it to portraiture as the referenced link's author suggests... the linked workflow suggested immediately above has an option to limit the effects to a mid-tone range so as not to clip highlights and shadows which for portraitures may not be necessary for the extreme effects that are suggested.
Sorry... I really did not really answer the question... I just know what it takes in PWP to get the type imagery suggested in the OP's referenced link....
Perhaps someone else could provide a more technical response... PWP's 'Composite-Blend' is an averaging with weighting of two images and PS's 'Overlay blending mode' is a form of PWP's Composite-Filter/SubtractFilter/Softlight/Hardlight modes.
Notice too how the referenced link's author avoids obvious light tone halos with the large blur radius HighPass image because the starting portrait image has a white background and that this whole effect trends toward 'high key'.
A portrait with a mid-tone or dark background would have very obvious halos....
Thanks for the very informative reply. You are right, I was thinking the Composite Transform worked like layers. I'm still a newbie, if that. Also, I totally missed the halo issue.
One of the things I've noticed is that most of the users of PWP seem to be nature photographers. There are also some portrait photographers, but I haven't seen anyone use it to edit or enhance product photos. Does that seem like a reasonable observation? I'm very impressed with this program. I wish I had known about it before I purchased Nikon's Capture NX2.
Cliff: If we can ignore for the moment Janko W’s method and his use of High Pass filters and only consider PS Overlay and PWP Soft Light as transformations using base and overlay images:
The PS Overlay method is described as a combination of the Multiply and Screen modes depending on the base tonal value. If the base value is darker than 50% gray, then the tonal value of the base and overlay are multiplied. If the base value is lighter than or equal to 50% gray, the values of the base and overlay are screened.
The PS definitions for Multiply and Screen are the same as the right hand portions of the PWP formulas for Filter and Subtractive Filter as shown below (extracted from the PWP online help for the Composite transformation). PS Source: Bruce Fraser et al.
Note: For simplicty, lets also ignore the PS Opacity and the PWP Amount settings.
Filter
v = v1*(100-oamt) + ((v1*v2)/255)* oamt Subtractive Filter
v = v1*(100-oamt) + (255-(((255-v1)*(255-v2))/255))* oamt
A definition of Soft Light is missing from my PWP 5.0 documentation. But from PWP 3.5 help:
If you select Soft Light, the result is a blend of Filter and Subtractive Filter (see above) based on the brightness of the base image.
The operations are performed on each R, G, & B channel. If we blend an image with itself using Overlay in PS or Composite Soft Light in PWP, the effect is an S curve with the above quadratics applied in each half of the tonal range.
So the underlying math of the PS Overlay and the PWP SoftLight is the same. The PS Soft Light uses a different formula altogether.
Sorry that I don’t have the time to dig out all the sources.
Thanks Jim for the additional information. You can't argue with mathematics. I feel a little overwhelmed at the effort you and Den went to to answer my question.
FWIW I have never used Photoshop. I just don't want to pay that much. I used to use Corel PhotoPaint and GIMP. Finding PWP was like finding a gold mine.