How to Remove Sharpening Halo Artifacts

 

Get the preset here: Dering After Effects Preset

Everything in this tutorial will be done in After Effects but you don’t need extended knowledge of the software to do so!
Before we start, I want to give credit to Bargus.org to have created the workflow and the preset, but they have been inactive for years and we want to preserve and archive this technique.

Alright, let’s get started on removing those sharpening artifacts!

So let’s take over our footage over After Effects, either start a new composition or if you work in Premiere you can do this at the end of your edit by doing a dynamic link to AE.
In this case, I am using drone footage, newer cameras don’t really have this issue but cameras with a smaller sensor and low processing power, like drones are more prone to this.

All we need to do is to duplicate that layer and apply the preset to the top layer.
Change the top layer blend mode to Multiply and bring it’s opacity down between 10-15%.

There you go, you salvaged the footage and the sharpening halo artifacts are (mostly) gone.

We can see that without sharpening rings the footage is more pleasing and less harsh.

Hope this will help you as much as it helped me!

 

Credits: Bargus