Sharpen up your workflow
James Paterson shows why sharpening should bookend your Lightroom workflow with these essential tools
How to sharpen images in Adobe CC
Sharpening is an essential part of editing, but it often leads to confusion over what tools to use, when to sharpen and how much to apply. As such, it can be helpful to think of sharpening as part of a wider workflow, as we’ll show.
Along the way we’ll perform initial sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom. Then take our image into Photoshop for a little retouching to remove the distracting leaf, before we round-trip back to Lightroom for final sharpening. Our workflow involves two distinct sharpening stages, one at the beginning and the other at the end.
The first stage is called capture sharpening. This involves general sharpening to correct for inherent softness in an image, or to crisp up details. It’s best done in Lightroom’s Detail panel (or in the panel in Photoshop’s Camera Raw). Capture sharpening can sometimes amplify image noise, especially in high-iso images. This is also a good time to apply noise reduction, if the image needs it. We’ll do so here with the Adjustment Brush, which lets us paint in noise reduction to specific areas that need it most.
As well as one of the first things we’ll do, sharpening is also often one of the last. This is called output sharpening, and this time the aim is to optimize detail with a specific output and resolution in mind – whether that be a print, or for viewing on-screen. We’ll use the Output Sharpening controls in Lightroom’s Export dialog, which make this an easy task.
Prepare the view
Import the image into Lightroom Classic and then go to the Develop Module. After making initial tweaks to enhance the tones in the Basic panel, head to the Detail panel. Click the Before/after view at the bottom left, then zoom in close to the image. A 100% view is usually best for judging sharpening and noise.
Set Detail and Masking
The Sharpening Detail slider controls how much the fine edges are sharpened. A high amount can amplify noise, which happened here with a setting of 45. Masking helps correct this. Hold Alt and drag Masking for a black-and-white view. The softer areas will show in black as you drag, and be masked from the sharpening.
Photoshop
Next, take the image into Photoshop for general retouching. Right-click the image and ‘Edit in Photoshop’, choose ‘Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments’ and hit OK. In Photoshop, use the Patch tool to remove the leaf by the lizard’s head, then close the image to return to Lightroom.
Apply capture sharpening
Begin in the Detail panel by increasing Sharpening Amount. This controls the strength of the sharpening effect. Next, adjust the Radius, which sets the distance from edges in which the sharpening occurs. A fairly low radius is usually better for high-frequency detail, like the lizard skin here. We’ve set Amount 90, Radius 0.9.
Fix the noise
We could try to reduce noise using the sliders in the Detail panel, but here we only want to correct it in the softer areas, so a selective adjustment could be a better option. Grab the Adjustment Brush from the toolbar, check Auto Mask, set Noise to 80, then paint over the blurred areas to reduce noise.
Output Sharpening
We can then export the image for a specific size and use Output Sharpening. Go to File>export and set Image Format to JPEG. In Image Sizing check Resize to fit: Long Edge, set 18cm at 300 pixels per inch. In Output Sharpening pick Sharpen for Matte Paper, Amount Standard and hit OK.