Sharpening in Lightroom - Tutorial

Hey guys, this week we're going to be taking a look at how we get the sharpest images possible using Lightroom. Hey guys, thanks so much for watching the video this week. We're going to be taking a look at how I approach sharpening my photos in Lightroom. There's a couple of different things that I do for most of my images and I wanted to share them with you today. So let's jump over to the computer. Okay, so here we are in Lightroom. This first image that we're looking at here, I've already made a few edits to, this is a focus stacked image and if you're interested in knowing more about focus stacking, I'm going to be releasing a tutorial series on that over at improved photography.com, but I have not done any sharpening at all to this image yet. So let's go ahead and show you how I'm going to edit this particular photo. Okay, so here we are. The first thing I'm going to do is kind of crop in on it a little bit, fix the composition. I want my leaf to be perfectly centered. So I'm going to crop in like that. And then I feel like it's a little bit overexposed at least down here in the foreground. So I'm going to bring down my highlights, maybe warm it up a tiny bit and we'll call this good for now for the sake of this tutorial. So the first thing that I do to every single photo that I'm sharpening, whether it's a portrait, a landscape or anything like that, I go down to my detail panel here and in our detail panel we have our noise reduction stuff, but we also have our sharpening and because I've already moved this photo over into Photoshop, focus stacked it and brought it back. The amount, it's not applying any sharpening to it right now. When you bring a raw file into Lightroom for the first time, typically your settings are going to be like this where you have like a little bit of sharpening being added, but it's being applied to everything. The most important slider in this detail panel is this masking slider. Now if I hold down the alt key and I slide this around, you can see as I slide it to the right, it's, it's sharpening only the edges, the most bold edges. And as I sharpen to the left, it starts to sharpen everything. So when you bring a file in the Lightroom for the first time, it's sharpening everything and then we don't really want that. There's a lot of times there's parts of our photos that we don't really want sharpened. So one of the things I like to do in every single photo is I hold down alt and I mask out some of my sharpening. And then, um, I boost the amount of sharpening that's happening. If we zoom way in here, one to one, let's find a place where we can actually see what we're doing here. Um, as I applied no sharpening, you can see in this area here, it's, it's fairly dull. It's not super sharp, but as I boost the amount, we start to see all that detail there. I'm being really heavy handed with this because this is a video. You're not going to be able to see the fine details, but, um, you can see how, as I move this masking to the left, it's sharpening absolutely everything. And you get that really over sharpened look really quickly. But if I bring my masking up and then, uh, then add my sharpening, it's not so bad. Another thing I like to do is to play with the radius slider here. If I hold down alt and I move my radius down, you can kind of get a feel for what it is that it does. Essentially, like especially if we zoom in here, essentially what it does is it, it changes the amount of area that it's focusing around each bold line. So as I come to the right, it starts getting really bold and crunchy. And as I go to the left, the sharpening gets more fine and wispy. So that's something that's going to be different for each photo. But I lie, I prefer to decrease my radius down to like 0.8, 0.7, something like that. And, uh, and then the detail, if I hold down alt and then I move that around, you can kind of see, you know, it's almost like the amount it's, it, it just, it's kind of hard to describe what it does, but it just, it's, it changes the amount of area around what you're, you're sharpening. It changes how much of around your lines you're, you're sharpening. So I like to increase the detail, decrease the radius and boost the amount. And you get something like this. Okay. So, um, another thing that I like to do in addition to masking out some of my, my sharpness is I like to, um, add the sharpness locally. And let me show you what I mean by that. Um, so here's the shot straight out of camera. And, uh, I'll make my initial adjustments here. Uh, just, just the normal stuff. Try to bring out some of the, some of the detail here. You can see I've already cropped in quite a bit on this image. Like all wildlife photography, it seems like you end up, um, really cropping in quite a bit. So make my initial adjustments here. And then I'll go down to my detail slider. You can see these are the defaults that it comes into Lightroom with. Now, anytime that you're cropping in on an image, you definitely want to decrease the radius because you've already cropped in. And if you have a really big radius, let's, let's boost our sharpness like a lot, just for the sake of this example. And then if I boost my radius, you can see it just starts getting this, ah, really crunchy craziness going on. Um, you can see what it's doing to the image. So because we're seeing fewer pixels, we need to decrease that radius a bit. And then I'm going to, um, I'm going to mask out my sharpening that because I don't need to be sharpening the Boca in this shot. I just need to be sharpening my bird. So to that end, I'm going to mask out my sharpening, something like that. And then we're getting less, we're amplifying the noise less. As I slide this masking slider to the left, you can see, Oh wow, look at all that noise. But as I mask it out, we're not sharpening the noise. Therefore we're not amplifying the noise, but let's say that I'm not content with this level of sharpening. Um, what I would do to boost the sharpness is I would take an adjustment brush, add a little bit of sharpness to it. And then I would just paint it over my subject with, with a, um, fairly low flow. That way I can kind of, uh, you know, add it in increments rather than just hitting it with a hammer. And then I'll just paint my sharpness where I want it. That way, cause in this particular shot, I don't want to be sharpening my Boca. I don't want to be sharpening anything other than my bird, which is my main subject because we want it to pop off of the background. And I would do it like that. I do this for a lot of my portrait photography as well. Um, because when you're dealing with out of focus areas that you want to remain soft and pretty, uh, you don't want to sharpen it. So I think, uh, this works really well for landscapes as well. You can emphasize certain parts of the photo and it works really well for all kinds of stuff. Hopefully this has been useful. Make sure you go over to Nick page, photography.com. Check out my work there. Check out the podcasts over at improve photography.com. We just launched tripod. It's a nature photography oriented, um, podcast that I think is going to be fairly popular with you guys. So go over, check it out. It's fun podcast to be a part of, and you can find all of that over at improve photography.com. Thanks so much. And we will catch you next time. Bye bye.