tutorial 3
George Cairns shows you how to add bite to images without adding noise
Sharpen up your shots without adding unwanted noise
every photographer knows that a sharp image is more pleasing than a soft one. Getting photos pin-sharp can be a challenge for a variety of reasons, however. Most Canon cameras have a built-in filter that blurs the image a little to avoid producing moiré patterns, and this low-pass (or anti-aliasing) filter can also soften details, such as a flower’s fine stigmas. By placing the camera close to a small subject, such as a flower, you risk getting a shallow depth of field. This leaves only a narrow band of detail in focus, and features in front of and behind this zone will look blurred. An image that appears sharp on your camera’s LCD may also look disappointingly soft on your computer’s larger screen.
Fortunately, Lightroom’s aptly named Detail panel is packed full of tools designed to tease out the fine details in a soft-looking photo, and that’s what we’ll be looking at more closely here. The Detail panel is very similar to Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask tool, but it gives you even more control over how you sharpen your images. These post-production sharpening tools work their magic by increasing the contrast around the edges of details in the image to give them more impact.
When you digitally sharpen using Lightroom’s sliders, you still need to take care and preview the image as you edit. There’s a risk of exaggerating picture noise in smooth areas (such as the clear blue background in our image here). if that wasn’t enough to be thinking about, you can also accidentally introduce artefacts, such as blown-out highlights, clipped shadows and distracting haloes to the sharpened areas. In this tutorial we’ll examine ways to sharpen key areas of your photos while keeping artefacts at bay.