LAB Sharpen

This is indeed a great tool as it saves a lot of manual work. Here is an idea to further improvement. It is based on Dan Margulis' observation that when sharpening with an unsharp mask you often want to separate the lightening and darkening effect in two separate layers and then apply about half as much lightening as darkening. This makes the pictures look more natural.

So what I do with your script is: Make two duplicates of the original picture so you keep the original picture unchanged, apply AK-LABSharpen to the top duplicate layer and then make an extra copy of this sharpened layer. The mode of the two sharpened layers is then set to Lighten only (top layer) and Darken only (below top layer) and the opacity of the upper layer is set to 50 %. Now merge down the Darken only layer and next the Lighten only layer. Now you have a sharpened layer on top of your original picture and you can then adjust the sharpening effect by setting the opacity of the sharpened layer. Voila!

If this process could be automated too it would improve this great tool further :-)

Looks good to me. Installed without a problem and works well. Certainly takes the hard work out of sharpening just the image luminance. Thanks for a very neat script.