Creative sharpening is best done in Lightroom with the Adjustment Brush. Select the brush and then dial in the effects you want. Keep in mind however, that this part of the process is called Creative Sharpening for a reason: it is where you do it your way.
Every situation will be different, so there is very little I can give you in the way of guidance in terms of amounts. In any case, after you have set your values for the Adjustment brush, just paint in the effect. After you are done, you can change the Sharpness, Clarity, and Contrast settings within the Adjustment Brush panel to make the image look the way you want. Only apply this effect only to critical areas of the image. That typically is the subject and perhaps a few other crucial details.
It is also very dependent upon your individual image and tastes. This is where you may spend the most time sharpening. When it is time to create a web version of the photo or a print, there is additional sharpening to do.
This is called Output Sharpening and it will take you outside the Lightroom Develop module. Why would you do Output Sharpening? Because different display vehicles require more or less sharpness.
An easy way to think about this is a web version of the print versus a print. For a web version, it will look pretty much like it already looks. You may give it a small dose of additional sharpening, but that will be it.
A print, on the other hand, might require considerably more sharpening. Because as fine tuned as the ink jets are, there is still a tiny bit of overlap between dots such that the image may appear a little bit soft in print.
Adding more sharpening helps eliminate this effect. I will assume you are making a JPEG file, since that is the file-type of almost all photos published online. When you do so, an Export dialog box will appear, and within that box you will have an option for Output Sharpening.
If you check the box, Lightroom will add sharpening based upon your final output. Be careful if you are uploading the file to a portfolio site like SmugMug as sometimes they also automatically apply additional sharpening to the image at upload.
This can make your image appear oversharpened. Be sure to turn that off if you are applying these sharpening techniques in Lightroom. If you are not printing in Lightroom, but you want to apply Output Sharpening in Lightroom, just Export the file as you did in the previous section. That will apply the sharpening, and then you can print the file using other software.
If you are printing within Lightroom, you apply Output Sharpening as part of that process. Take your picture into the Print module. In the print controls on the right hand side, scroll down to the Print Job category. Within that category, you will see a box for Print Sharpening. Check the box and it will give you options for output.
Choose Matte or Glossy depending on what type of paper you are using. After that, choose Low, Standard, or High to determine the amount of sharpening to apply. Start by applying a High amount of sharpening, and adjust if it looks oversharpened to you.
The edges that are being affected become clearly defined and the areas of the photograph where this effect is not being applied will be left hidden behind a gray overlay. I like to think of the detail slider as a fine-tuning slider or even just simply as picking up from where the radius slider left off.
Rather than focusing on the hard edges of the image the detail slider is designed more for bringing out the finer textures of the images. The further you push the detail slider to the right the more high frequency data will be displayed resulting in more textures in your image.
Be warned, if you push it too far in some cases the outcome will be overly sharp or you may start sharpening unwanted noise. To help you determine the optimum positioning of the detail slider the option overlay available works in much the same way as the radius slider showing you where your detail is being applied by showing you the areas affected by your changes.
The masking slider allows you to in a sense control where your sharpening is to occur. The higher you set the number, the more this control will start to reduce the amount of variance between the pixels, this will smooth the pixels out and reduce the amount of noise.
However, the more that you reduce the luminance noise, the more you will start to lose details in the image as a whole. Finding a balance here can be tricky which is also the reason why the two subsequent sliders exist.
This control is to help you regain pixel contrast within the small subsets of pixels. It is looking for the smaller grouped pixels that have been smoothed over and by increasing this control it will try to increase the contrast within those small pixel packets. The Contrast slider works very similarly to the Detail slider, but instead of targeting the smaller sets of pixels, this looks to retain contrast in the larger groups of contrasting pixels. You will see the larger shapes and color sets become more defined as you increase this slider.
This control is here to help reduce the color noise and variance between the color in the pixels. It's similar to modifying the hue and saturation controls, but on a grouped pixel-by-pixel basis. It can identify the color differences between pixels and it will look for a color in between the two to essentially even them out to become closer in color to each other. The higher you push this control, the more pixels will start to take on color similar to surrounding pixels.
If you overdo it, then the pixels start to edge towards neutral hues, becoming more gray in color. This slider will look to retain the color differences between the small sets of pixels. The higher you move the control, the more color variance will be retained. The lower you keep the control, the pixels packets will continue to look similar to surrounding pixels. I recommend sliding the control all the way to , just to see how intense the control really does affect your image and then scale it back to find a nice middle ground for your image.
This will probably not surprise you, but the Smoothness slider works very similar to the Detail slider. Instead of solely targeting the small groups of pixel sets, this control will even out the colors in a widening range when you increase the control.
Setting the control at 0 means that the pixel packets will stay as they are. I like to think of this as a control for reducing splotchy areas in the image. When starting to adjust this control, you will see small groups of pixels that have similar colors. These small groups are what we see in splotchy color patterns within the image. The more you increase the control then you will start to see splotchy groups of pixels start to even out and the areas of mass within the image will attain a more uniform color.
It is like expanding the radius of color similarities between grouped pixels to become larger groups of similar pixels. If done too much, then you will see patches of color disappear as they take on enough of the surrounding pixels and end up in a neutral zone. Striking a balance between each of these controls is how you can simultaneously sharpen your image while reducing the amount of noise.
It's fairly easy to spot when an image has been sharpened too much, or when it has had the noise reduced to a point where the image as a whole becomes muddled and loses too much contrast. Below is a simple before and after between what Lightroom applies to the image by default and what I have set for my images as a default preset which is applied upon import. Above is a screenshot of the settings that I have found to work well for my files, in general.
This is a Lightroom preset that I use to jumpstart my sharpening process. It's nothing fancy, but the controls that have been set up in it are exactly what you see in the screenshot, it is simply a default setup that tend to work well for my files as a blanket application for sharpening and noise reduction.
I purposely set the controls for the preset to start higher than is likely necessary, by doing that I am able to gain a good grasp as to what the image is capable of and I scale back the controls as needed. Again, take the time to test the limits of the controls, find what works for your own files and your own preference, and roll with that. Rex lives in Saint George, Utah. Shooting landscapes is always his first choice but he also shoots his fair share of portraits.
He is a full time student, working on his degree at Southern Utah University. He is a reserve firefighter with the City of Saint George, and works periodically as a photography adventure tour guide. Check out the Fstoppers Store for in-depth tutorials from some of the best instructors in the business. I really like the masking slider too. That's good to know!
I haven't tested the other software like you have, but at this point I don't think I will. I'm used to how LR works and I like how it treats image sharpening. Is the description of the detail slider accurate? My understanding was that the slider essentially applies a pixel-level weighted average between unsharp mask the 0 setting and a Richardson-Lucy deconvolution sharpening method the setting. Has that changed? You have hit upon one of the areas that is least understood about the program.
Even Adobe's own documentation doesn't make it explicitly clear how that particular slider works, at least as far as the precise mechanics behind the tool. You did make a good point, I could have done a better job at clarifying what the tool does. I have updated that section. It can't be a Richardson-Lucy deconvolution, first because it's a computation heavy iterative process, second because it needs a blur kernel input, and I don't see any.
Performing a RL-deconvolution with a wrong blur kernel leads to ringing and weird artifacts, so I don't think they would guess it inside. Very interesting! I wish I could find the source for the info I had. I believe it was a Jeff Schewe book on Camera Raw and some forum postings at Adobe a number of years ago.
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