How To Sharpen Photos Lightroom and Photoshop

Just about every image we shoot on our digital cameras needs some level of sharpening. Today, I'll show you how to do sharpening both in Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. Hi, I'm Terry Vander Heiden, professional photographer. Sharpness in your images is arguably one of the most important aspects of wildlife photography. A sharp image is so much easier to look at, and so it's very important to learn how to make sharp images. While learning how to sharpen images in post-production, like I'm going to show you today, is an important skill, learning how to make sharp images in the first place, in the camera, is even more essential. That's why I created the e-book, Razor Sharp Nature Photography. This e-book takes you through all the things you need to know to create razor sharp wildlife images. It's been sold all over the world to thousands of photographers, and it's available exclusively on my website, ImageLight.com. Just go under the digital products page and you'll find it right there. Now, if you want your own copy of the e-book, Razor Sharp Nature Photography, I'll leave a link in the description below. So let's jump into Lightroom Classic, and I'm going to show you how I do this process for sharpening images. We're going to start here. I've got an image of a hooded oriole. So first thing we're going to do is go in and do a little cropping. And as you know, cropping is going to reveal a little bit more of how sharp something is. So I always think it's a good idea to do your cropping first. Make sure that you got exactly what you're going to be looking at. All right, so there's our first image. Now, what we're going to do is a little bit of work on this before we start doing the sharpening. So let's go ahead and zoom this up to 200%. Let's see what we've got. You can see, while it's a decent shot, it was the only... This bird landed here. I took a shot of it and it took off. I never saw it again. So this was not exactly a great sharp image to begin with, but it's going to be great for this exercise here today. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go in the basic panel and we're going to do a little bit of shadow lifting. So we're going to lift up the shadows in here as well as on his eye here. Okay, do just a little bit of that. And it looks like the highlights are okay, but we're going to bring them down just a little bit. There, that looks good. And then you've seen me do this before. I like to use some masks to kind of improve the look of, say, the eye, for instance. So let's go over to the mask and we're going to do a brush mask. And we're going to come over here and we're going to grab my custom brushes, which are also available on my digital products page. And these are all just wildlife brushes, brushes that we use as presets for creating wildlife images and making them look quite a bit better. So the first brush here is for the eye, and we're going to zoom this up to 300% so we can see this better. I'm going to take this little brush and we're just going to paint around the iris. And the idea here is this is just going to lighten up that iris a little bit more. Now we're going to do an additional brush. And the way we do that, we just hit the letter K. And we're going to change this brush this time to the second one in that series. Instead of 001, we're going to go to 002, Iris Highlight. And this one, we're just going to paint in the lower part of this, just about half of it. And we're going to do this again. Hit the letter K, get a new brush, and then go to number three in that series. And we're just going to paint. Let's go ahead and turn the auto off and put it to never so we can just see what we're doing a little bit better. There. So we've got kind of three levels of highlights there. That last one seems a little harsh, so we're just going to pull that back by coming down to this amount slider and just pull it back just a little bit. All right, so that eye looks a lot better. I'll show you the off and on on that. There's off and there's on. So that brings attention to the eye. While everything's not sharp yet, it still brings attention to the eye. So let's pull back and see if there's anything else that we need to do. Yeah, I think there's one thing we could do. Let's go ahead and add another mask. This time it'll be a radial gradient. And let's go ahead and bring it around the bird. We're going to put this back up on the auto. Now, auto will leave these tags on, but you can see that we can still see them. If you don't want to see them, all you have to do is bring your cursor down below the main screen and all those tags go away. So that makes it a little more convenient. And I've got this set on a green mask. If we want to change that, we just come over here to masks and we'll just make it red, for instance. Or we'll actually pick the red that we've used in the past. Good. We can see the mask that we've created. And again, if we don't want to see all the info, we can just pull this away and see what we've got. Now, I'm not going to mask this area of the bird. What we're going to do is mask everything but. So we're going to come up here to the three little dots and go to invert mask four. Now it's selected everything else. And this we're going to darken down. So we're going to create a little bit of a vignette. And then whenever I do a vignette, I also like to bring the saturation down just a little bit. Now that's just in these outer areas, right? And it gradiates down into the actual subject. All right. So I like this. Let's go ahead and turn this off so we can see what we're doing. There. Okay. That looks good. So we're going to do this a couple of ways. So I'm going to go ahead and make a virtual copy. We're just going to right click and create a virtual copy. And we'll do this again. And we're going to right click and create another virtual copy. And we'll color code these. I'm going to right click. Let's go ahead and go up here. I'm going to right click. That was just the letter G that got me back to the grid mode. And I'm just going to put a yellow on that one and red on this one. So what we'll do is this will be the Lightroom. Actually, you know what? Let's make this green. That'll be a little bit easier for me. All right. We have our original and we have our Lightroom one that we're going to do. And then we're going to also have the Photoshop one. So let's go in here. Now for sharpening, what generally we're going to do, we're going to go into our develop module. And we're going to go down to detail. And what I like to do is I like to slide all these sliders over to the very end to begin with. And we got to bring this up to probably at least 200% so we can see what this looks like. And now what we're going to do is drag the sharpening over. I usually like to start at around, you know, mid 90s. And now I'm going to bring over the radius. And the way I do that, I hold the option key down on the Mac. It'll be the alt key on the PC. And we drag this over. And I like to make sure that I get a nice detailed rendering drawing of this gray drawing. So that gives me an idea that all the things that are going to be involved in this sharpening. And we'll do the same thing to detail, option or alt. And slide this over until we get some good detail. There. So now this is the sharpening that we've done. We're going to turn off and on. We'll see everything that we've done there. You can see that we've, that's the difference in sharpening with Lightroom. And we can maybe even bring this up just a little bit more if we like. So now if we want to take this a step further, we can come in here to masks. And let's go ahead and create a new mask. Let's zoom back just a little bit. Create a new mask. And what we're going to do is select the subject. And the best way we found for selecting subjects is use the object selection tool. I get this little line and we'll draw this around it. All right. It's selected that. And so this we're going to look at up close. Again, we'll go up to 200%. And we're going to see about changing, adding a little more sharpening in the detail right here. This slider here, it's set at zero. Let's go ahead and pump that up just a little bit. All right. So that's about as far as we can go now up close. It looks still a little, a little crunchy, but back at a hundred percent, it's not looking too bad. Maybe it fit. It looks pretty good, but that's, that's basically how we're going to do this sharpening on this through Lightroom Classic. All right. So let's go over to this image here, which is our main image that we're going to run into Photoshop and all the regular parameters that we just did inside of Lightroom are there, except the sharpening. So let's come over to here and we're going to right-click and bring this into Photoshop. Let me know in the comments, what you like to do for sharpening. This is the steps I like to take. So if I'm in a hurry, I'll do some sharpening inside of Lightroom Classic, which is, it works okay, but if I'm really going to be really fine, it's the one image I'm going to do. Maybe I'm going to put it on the wall. Maybe I'm going to share it. That's something that I'll probably bring in the Photoshop and do the sharpening, which I'm about to show you. But let me know in the comments, what you think about sharpening and how you use it, because it's interesting. I learn a lot from the comment section. People will say, Hey, try this. And I do, and it's great. So it's a learning process for both of us. All right. We're inside Photoshop, but now we have the same image we just worked on without the sharpening. So we're going to do our own sharpening on this. So let's go ahead and zoom this up so we can get a nice close look at it. Yep. Still looks the same. You know, the highlights that we did in the eyes are super important in that that really helps bring attention to the eye, but we also want to sharpen this up as best as we can. Now, again, this is not perfect from the, from the get go. So we're going to try to improve this in, in post-production. So the first thing we're going to do is go over to our layers. We're going to make a new layer. We know how to do that. That's command J or control J. If you're on a PC, now we've got a new layer up here. And what we're going to do is we're going to label that sharpen. So that's our sharpening layer. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to activate the way that I sharpen, which I go to filter and I go to Topaz labs and go to Topaz sharpen AI. This is what I use. Now you don't have to go out and buy another program unless you want to. If you like this process and maybe you want to Topaz, of course, doesn't, doesn't even give me the program, let alone pay me to do this. This is just how I do it. So you can decide whatever works best for you. So I like to put it in the split view so I can see kind of a little bit of difference of how this looks. So as we zoom this up, it's right at a hundred percent. And I kind of, I encourage people to work at 200% when they're working on sharpening, because we really want to make sure we see everything that's happening here. So as we look over in the way this model works, there's lots of these different models. There's motion out of focus and softness. So I like, this is standard. This is kind of the default here. And what I like to do is go down and try to take a look and see what's the best. But before we do this, we're going to remove some sharpening here. So I'm going to remove some blur rather. So let's bring this up to, we'll just bring it up to 60 or so 61. Now you can see how much sharper that looks, right? A little, little crunchy, but let's see what else we have here. We have motion blur normal. That's kind of a different way that it will work with that image. We have out of focus normal. Not quite as good. And we have our too soft and let's pull that and see what that looks. That's not that great either, but let's go to the extremes. We got motion, very blurry. And then we've got out of focus, very blurry. And we've got too soft, very blurry. I think the best here is motion blur. And I think I shot this at one 32 hundredth of a second, even though that's not really what the issue was. I think the issue was when I focused on this, my focus box wasn't quite on the eye right yet. And so that's what happens. So as we look at these three levels, I think motion blur, very blurry looks the best. Now we're a little high at 76. So let's go ahead and pull that down. Yeah, probably about there. That should work fine. So now we hit apply and we'll let Topaz do its magic. I think it's a wonderful program. I'd love it if they sponsored me. So if Topaz you're watching this, go ahead and reach out to me. That'd be great. But this to me is just a better job of sharpening. But check this out. This is a bit of an issue that we got to kind of concern ourselves with. Let's take a look at the leaves around here. I'm going to turn the sharpening off and on. See that? They were soft and out of focus, but it did some sharpening to the actual leaves. Things that should be out of focus are sharpened. And I don't really, I don't really like that. So the way that I typically will always do a sharpening is I'm going to go in and make a layer mask. And in this layer mask, I'm going to go ahead and select just the bird and have just the bird in this image so that I can do some work with that. So we come over here to our select subject. Come up to the top and hit select subject. So we can see it did a pretty good job of selecting bird, but it also selected the tail feathers. And I don't care about that. So I'm going to click on the lasso tool. And I'm going to hold the Option key down, Alt key if you're on the PC. And we're just going to draw a big circle around this. To kind of eliminate that from our selection. So now what we've got is just the selection of just the bird, the upper part of the bird. And it seems close enough for this discussion. So we've got our layer mask already activated. So what we want to do is we want to fill this area. So we're going to go up to edit and we're going to go to fill. And we're going to fill it with black. So now we've got our layer mask created and we have our bird still selected. So we don't need to have the bird selected anymore. So we're going to do Command or Control D and that turns off the selection. Now we come over to this mask and we do Command I and that's going to invert it. So now all the things that we're going to do are going to be affecting just the background. And that's exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted to keep the sharpening on the bird, but we didn't need that sharpening on those leaves that really need to be out of focus in the background. And you can see here that now when I click this off and on, the sharpening is only happening on the bird. So I think that looks pretty good. But let's zoom up and get a little fussy with this for just a second. So as we look close here, yes, it's sharper and we're way zoomed up way. We're at 300%. So the way that we can do this is we've got this kind of little fuzz going across the top, right? It's the transition between where it sharpens and gets out of focus because we had just made that selection. And so what I want to do is I want to make a new layer and do a little bit of work on it. And so what I want to do here is I want to make a combo layer. And a combo layer, you've seen me probably do this before. That's a big handful of buttons that we push here. We're going to hold the Shift, Option, Command, and the letter E. And then, of course, if you were doing this on the PC, it'd be Shift, Alt, Control, and the letter E. That gives us a combo layer of everything below that we've done. So now this gives us the freedom to actually do a little bit of retouching work. So I like to use the clone tool. So we'll go over here and grab this. Now watch what happens. If I take this and I select here using the Alt key or the Option key, I click an area that I want to draw from and I come over here and I want to start drawing in. You can see I can make a little bit of a mistake. So what I want to do is I want to get that selection back that we created over this bird. So I want to come over here and I'm on the layer mask. I'm going to hold the Command or the Control key if you're on the PC and click and that brings that selection back. So now we've got a nice selection of our bird. And unfortunately, right now it's selecting the bird and not everything but the bird. So we got to go up here and make sure we're on this top layer and we're going to go Shift, Command, I. And that's going to shift the selection to everything but the bird. Okay, so let's go ahead and zoom in. So now we've got our selection. We can see that selection is pretty good. It's inside of all that little fuzzy stuff. So what we're going to do first is we're going to hide this selection. The way we do this on a Mac, Command H or Control H on a PC and now that hides it. It's still active, it just hides it. So we're on our top layer and now what we're going to do is we're going to use our Stamp tool and we're going to be at 100% and we're going to grab some of the color that's next to this. And we do that by holding the Option key down or Alt key, click. And now we've locked in that. And then we're just going to go along this edge. And what's nice is we aren't going to go into the bird, right? We're just working with just the stuff on the outside. So once you get through a little area, then always keep re-grabbing a new area of tone. This is going to be important as we get to this white area. Okay, good. Let's go ahead and grab right in between here. Come in there in the white area here. Again, I'm just clicking, holding that Option key down and grabbing a new target color, new target tone as we go through here. And we can simply remove any of this halo area. It doesn't take too long to make this look a lot more realistic. And we can do it down here. And again, it's not over the entire bird. It's not that critical elsewhere. A little bit down here, we can fix that. Hit that Option key. You're just grabbing a new target, right? The new target color. And just painting that in right in up to the edge of that selection. Remember here, I'm going to bring it back. That selection is still active. We've just hidden it so we don't see it. We see a little bit down here. And you see how this is. So this is what we're going to do. We can just go through here and make any of the changes that we want to make. Let's go ahead and fix this while we're at it. It's a little oddly dark. Good. And that's how we got it. So this is, we like it. So we're just going to go ahead and click Save. And bring it back into Lightroom Classic. We've got our original PSD file here. And we've got our image that we worked inside of Lightroom Classic. So let's go ahead and bring those together. We'll click on both of those. And we'll do the Compare mode. Now remember, this is the Photoshop version. This is the Lightroom version. So depending on what you like better, you can have that ability to do that. I think the Photoshop version using Topaz Sharpen is just way better. Especially on these details. So for me, that's how I'm going to go. But this was faster, obviously. But look at the difference. Look at the difference of the little stick. Which is a little bit annoying that it's there in the first place. But the feathers have a little more detail in it. Feathers here have detail. Around the eye has more detail. I just think it looks better. So the main takeaway I'd like you to have is that if you decide you have time... If you don't have time, just do some sharpening inside of Lightroom Classic. But if you have time, go into Photoshop. And just make a new layer that's just for your sharpening layer. And if you have Topaz, great. Or you can use whatever program you like for sharpening. But do that on a separate layer. And then create a layer mask so you can really refine what gets sharpened. You don't want to sharpen the entire image most of the time. You just want to sharpen your subject. So that's the way that I think is the best way to go about doing it. Is doing it inside of Photoshop. And create a couple layers. Do that layer mask. Then you have much more control over the output of the image. I hope you guys learned something. Remember to subscribe if you're not already a subscriber. Appreciate you guys watching. See you next time.