Photo Processing - Brightness and Unsharp Mask

[Sivakatirswami]

There are times when it would be nice to escape the shackles of  
"Adobe dependency"

Bottom line question:

Is there a way to apply Unsharp Mask and Levels adjustments to photos  
from inside Revolution?

The long version:


Processing photos for the web is such a simple job. There are times  
when booting Photoshop-Image ready are unwanted or unavailable. But  
there is no question: Image Ready which uses Photoshops rendering  
algorithms, does a a great job.

In Revolution I am able to, for example, take a 2.1 meg digital  
camera file and load it into an image, set the image to the web size,  
say 345 px wide and export to a file with jpg 40... OK the downsizing  
works well, fast in fact, final file size is perfect. But if I  
compare the image exported from Revolution with the same image run  
through my Image Ready droplet (built with the help of coaching from  
retired photo pro from the NY fashion world who used to be  
responsible for getting 700 shots from  the runway, up online by the  
end of every day, during big shows in europe...)  we get a much  
better (way better!) image from Image ready... increasing the JPEG  
quality doesn't help much in Revolution.

What I'm seeing is two things:
-- Lack of unsharp mask = "smudgy edges" compared to the Image Ready  
version
-- and a "dullness" in the Revolution version, compared to image  
ready output.

Image Ready process I'm using is not that complex: does the following:
1) uses the bicubic algorithm on the downsampling
2) auto levels ( important this is done here... not before the  
downsizeing and not after unsharp masking)
3) unsharp mask  -- Radius 0.4, threshold 0, amount 150 --  Also  
important to run this as the very last filter on the final image,  
which should not be "touched" thereafter.

Now, I know I can use the new Core Image tools from inside Revolution  
to process the photos on the Mac, which would be very "cool" but what  
i would really like is for this to be cross platform. This way I can  
get my remote "editors" to supply web ready photos to our spec,  
already processed.  Most of these people are not in a position to  
purchase Photoshop or technically savvy enough to know about filters  
(simple as these are)  I'm already supplying them wiht a simple  
catalog, captioning, renaming tool build with Rev... so added a photo  
processor to that UI would be a great integration of work  flow.

Sivakatirswami