The sharp end
James Paterson explains why sharpening should bookend your Lightroom workflow while showing you how to use some essential tools
Sharpening is an essential part of imageediting, 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 do in this tutorial. Along the way we’ll perform initial sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom, then take our image into Photoshop for retouching to remove the distracting leaf. Then we’ll round-trip back to Lightroom
for final sharpening. As such, our workflow involves two distinct sharpening stages, one at the beginning and another at the end.
The first stage is often called Capture sharpening. This involves
general sharpening to correct for inherent softness in the image, or to crisp up important details. It’s best done in Lightroom’s Detail panel (or in the near-identical panel in Photoshop’s Camera Raw). Capture sharpening can sometimes amplify image noise, especially in high-iso images. So this is also a good time to apply noise reduction if the image requires it. We’ll do so here with the Adjustment Brush, which lets us paint in noise reduction selectively to the areas in the photo that need it most.
As well as one of the first things we’ll do to our image, sharpening is also often one of the last. This is called Output sharpening, and this time the aim is to optimize the detail with a specific output and resolution in mind – whether that be a print size or for viewing on-screen. We’ll use the Output Sharpening controls within Lightroom’s Export Dialog to make this a simple task.