Although all images are going to have slightly different sharpening needs, a regular workflow for sharpening will help you optimize your images consistently.
Now that we’ve covered all the mechanics of sharpening, let’s put this all together with six simple steps for sharpening in Adobe Lightroom.
Starting With Lightroom’s Defaults – 25-1-25-0:
Lightroom’s default sharpening for images is as follows:
These are fairly conservative settings that are broad enough to work for most images in adding clarity and revealing detail. For these reasons, in my workflow, I keep these defaults and use them as a starting point.
Sharpening Workflow Example:
In this sharpening exercise, we’ll take this shot of Girl Talk at The Bamboozle 2010.
This image was made with the Nikon D3 and Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 – here are the details:
Thanks to lens performance and the relatively low ISO, there’s plenty of detail to look at in this show of Girl Talk – perfect for a little sharpening tutorial.
Step 1 – Identifying the Details:
Before adjusting any of the sliders for sharpening, I think that one of the key aspects of the process is to determine the key details and elements in the image that are most important to reading the image. Whether these are the fine details in a landscape or the eyes in a portrait, understanding this hierarchy will help you sharpen with purpose and efficiency.
In this shot, which is essentially a portrait, the main details I want to emphasize are the details of the face and hair.
Step 2 – Adjusting the Amount:
It’s no coincidence that Adobe orders the sliders the way they are; the first variable I change is the overall strength of the sharpening using the Amount slider. I go back and forth between the preview mode and the full-color mode, and I aim for a rendering that emphasizes the levels of detail that are most important in the image.
Overall, my goal with this first adjustment is to get the key details looking good and “roughly” sharp. You don’t have to worry about the perfect amount of sharpening yet; that’s where the other sliders come in.
Here's a crop of Girl Talk – AKA Gregg Gillis – with the default sharpening settings in Lightroom. Overall, the image looks sharp, but exhibits a slight softness due to the anti-aliasing filter of the camera and other factors. We can do better – and the Detail pane will help us.
Holding down the Option Key enables the B&W preview mode for the Amount slider – dialing in 60 produces a good level of visual acuity to start with.
Step 2 – Adjusting the Radius:
I find it most useful to start with a low Radius setting and move up from there. My general rule for adjusting the Radius is to start at 0.5 and move the slider up until the sharpening begins to degrade image quality, and then move back accordingly to find the best balance.
Using the preview mode for the Radius slider as a guide, a Radius of 1.0 pixels achieves a good balance between the fine and course details of the image. Since there's no superfine detail in this midrange portrait, a medium setting of 1.0 pixels works well for the Radius.
The proper Radius setting depends on a few elements, including the apparent size of details, the details you want to emphasize and those you want to minimize. In addition, the optics and sensor performance (particularly at high ISO) will play a factor in the their ability to render and record detail, respectively. Lenses with high micro-contrast will benefit from a smaller radius, while a lens that renders a more coarse image won’t, for example.
Step 4 – Adjusting the Detail:
Once the proper Radius has been set, the Detail slider comes into play to fine-tune the high-frequency sharpening of the image. Similarly to finding the sweetspot for the Radius, a number of factors will determine how much detail you can – or will want to – enhance.
Using the preview mode for the Detail slider, we can get an idea of the current edge-sharpening applied at this level of 25.
Thanks to the sharpness of the lens and the subject, there's plenty of detail. Cranking up the Detail slider to a high setting of 80 really emphasizes the details of the hair.
For my images, I generally prefer as much detail as possible, and will liberally crank up the Detail slider as high as possible without the introduction of artifacts.
When adjusting the Detail slider, things to watch out for include pixelization, jagged edges, and halos created by sharpening. For better or for worse, these are artifacts that will generally appear with very finely rendered details and sharp lenses.
Step 5 – Adjusting the Masking:
After applying the sharpening adjustments, masking is the next step. Though it’s not necessary or desirable for all scenes, masking is a great way to selectively apply sharpening without enhancing noise or emphasizing unwanted details in the image.
Whether it’s to keep shadow areas clean or leave skintones soft, Masking is a really nice touch that comes close to the ability to selectively sharpen in Adobe Photoshop.
After adjusting the Detail slider, we can see that the shadow regions of the image are being sharpened a little unnecessarily.
Using the Masking preview, it's easy to adjust the sharpening application to only affect the midtone and highlight regions that hold the details we want to emphasize – all while leaving the less detailed shadow areas clean.
Step 6 – Review & Tweaking:
Lastly, I review the sharpness and tweak as necessary. Since all of the sharpening adjustments in Lightroom affect one another, revising and finding a the proper balance is crucial for the best results. In particular, any increase in the Detail slider from the default you used for gauging the Amount will invariably affect the perceived sharpness, and adjustment will be necessary.
The sharpening process is best viewed as a feedback loop, and your eyeballs and brain as the reflex mechanisms for finding the right mix of settings.
Again, here is the image after the first pass of through the Detail adjustments.
Reviewing the image after the first rundown through the sliders leaves the final image just a little "crispy," a problem that is easily solved by returning to the Amount adjustment.
Here's a before and after comparison of the Girl Talk image once we've taken it through custom sharpening. Overall, we see a relatively high degree of sharpening that gives much more emphasis to hair and skin details.
In this comparison, you can see the dramatic difference sharpening can have on a file. While the default settings are a good start, they do leave room for improvement and customized adjustments.
Just as there are no definitive sharpening settings that work for all images, different settings may work for one image as well. In this example of Girl Talk, I could easily see using a much lower Detail setting, higher masking, and a slightly higher Amount.
The beauty of Lightroom is that all of these sharpening effects are reversible and fully adjustable, so tweak away.
In review, the six steps we utilized in this sharpening tutorial included:
In practice, the last step of review and tweaking may take several passes to achieve the best possible levels of sharpening. Ultimately, it’s important to keep in mind that just like so many variables in photography, there are no perfect ideals, but only preferences.
There are no perfect sharpening settings for any given RAW file; moreover, there may be multiple ways to achieve “proper” sharpening for any given image, with different combinations of the Sharpening sliders yielding similar and equally acceptable results. In the end, you have to trust your eye to find the right balance required by each image.
If you haven’t already, check out my guide to Understanding Sharpening in Adobe Lightroom for a more detailed look at how all of these adjustments work for enhancing image sharpness.
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This entry was posted on Monday, October 4th, 2010 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Photography Tutorials and tagged with amount, contrast, detail, guide, how to, lightroom, lightroom 3, radius, sharpening, sliders, tutorial, unsharp mask. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Tutorial: 6 Steps For Sharpening In Lightroom: Although all images are going to have slightly different sharpening… http://goo.gl/fb/anGh6
Great information!!
..so have you moved totally to Lightroom for all your post production concert work?
Hey Dave, thanks for the comment, hope this helps.
I use Lightroom for the majority of my photography processing now – I was actually surprised the other day when I actually preferred Lightroom’s treatment of a portrait to Nikon Capture NX 2.
Excellent tutorial Todd! I didn’t even realize there where individual preview modes for seeing the effects of each sharpening slider. There are probably quite a few shortcuts I don’t know yet with LR3.
So has Adobe hired you as one of their ‘Product Evangelists’ yet?
Thanks again.
Hey Michael,
Yes, the preview modes for sharpening are great – for more info on the different settings, definitely check out the guide to Understanding Sharpening In Lightroom that I wrote.
Not on the Adobe payroll yet, I just like what I see, and I do use LR for most of my processing these days. Thanks for the comment, I appreciate it.
Great tutorial as usual Todd. I finally switched to Lightroom 3 a few weeks ago, and I love it. I do almost all of my post processing in Lightroom. Not sure about their noise reduction yet, and whether I am just not using it correctly, or if it just isn’t as good as Noise Ninja. I need to keep playing with it.
Are you still using Noise Ninja, or have you been happy with the noise reduction in Lightroom 3?
Hey Kevin, thanks for the comment – glad to hear you’re liking Lightroom 3 as well.
I have Noise Ninja, but I very rarely use it. I basically stopped using NN after switching to the Nikon D3 and D700; it was a necessity with the old Nikon D2x.
In the comparisons I’ve done between Noise Ninja and Lightroom, I found LR to be easier to use with results that could be as good as Noise Ninja. The interface is just different, so it takes getting used to.
I should say that for most of my images, I only use the default Chroma noise reduction in LR.
Same here. If I use the Lightroom noise reduction, I only use the default chroma (or maybe adjust it up a bit depending on the situation). However, Lightroom seems to set some type of base level luminance noise reduction that I often have to tweak a bit because it dulls some details (or at least I think, haha).
I am trying to work away from Noise Ninja simply because it would be easier to do all post processing in one software, and then only tweaks and such in PS. I still find PS so much easier to use when cloning and touching up. The Lightroom brushes, etc seem so foreign.
I can’t say whether LR does a base luminance NR, but LR does have a very fine rendering for the noise pattern – a much finer grainularity than Nikon Capture NX 2 renders, for example (which I covered in my initial comparison between LR3 and NX2 (http://ishootshows.com/2010/01/22/lightroom-3-vs-nikon-capture-nx-2/)
The only thing I use Photoshop for now are portraits, when more post processing may be necessary. Lightroom isn’t perfect as a one-stop shop yet, but I’d say it’s about 85-90% there.
Yeah…the luminance NR once again may all be in my head. I would have to do some side-by-side screen shots to be sure.
I do like the results I am getting from their noise reduction, it’s just taking me a bit longer to get them processed right now because I am not used to the “controls” quite yet. A few hundred more photos and I’ll be golden ;-)
I would say you are right about the 90% there. I might would even venture a little higher in my opinion. I really am enjoying it quite a bit. If they could get their thumbnail rendering as quick as Photo Mechanic, I might give them 99% :D
I’d be interested to see you sharpen some D2X images, because many readers don’t have the benefit of a D3 or D700. I find most of my D200 images (even ISO100 or 200) need at least moderate NR as well as sharpening masking in proportion to the detail slider.
Tutorial: 6 Steps For Sharpening In Lightroom http://bit.ly/cEmyYo
Brilliant, I never even knew where to begin with LR sharpening. I’ve been happy with straight up unsharp mask in PS.
Thanks for detailing everything you need to know for custom sharpening.
Jim.
Hey Jim,
Thanks for the comment – hope this helps with your workflow. Unsharp mask in Photoshop is a great start, but I think that the flexibility and non-destructive/reversible nature of Lightroom’s adjustments are really a nice touch.
Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
RT @toddowyoung Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
RT @toddowyoung: Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
RT @toddowyoung: Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
RT @toddowyoung: Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
RT @toddowyoung: Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
Some killer lightroom sharpening tips for your digital workflow from @toddowyoung on his blog – http://bit.ly/ccQ9LC
To the point &straightforward and works! Thx todd RT @toddowyoung: Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
RT @toddowyoung Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr < ace tutorial!
Check out Rock Photographer @toddowyoung 's latest Lightroom Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In Lightroom – http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
This is a great tutorial and after reading Understanding Sharpening In Lightroom before hand, it made following along so much easier especially with the preview function.
I do have a question though. So in camera do you set your “Image Sharpening” to Normal and then post process or do you set it on High and then sharpen some more afterwards?
Hey Sherman,
Thanks for the comment. Glad to hear this tutorial was useful along with the other guide.
In-camera, I have sharpening set to the default. Lightroom will ignore this camera setting and apply its own standard 25-1-25-0 adjustments for the default sharpening.
If I were using Nikon Capture NX 2, then that program would recognize the in-camera settings, but since Adobe Lightroom basically ignores most of the RAW settings like sharpening, we work with the Adobe defaults.
mandatory to read. Wait for @cnx2 version RT @toddowyoung: Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
RT @toddowyoung: Tutorial: 6 Easy Steps For Sharpening In @Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
RT @toddowyoung Tutorial: 6 Steps For Sharpening In Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
Nice walkthrough Todd. I’m often guilty of neglecting the sharpening of my RAW files when I have a large batch from a show.. I just leave LR on default, but it’s amazing how much the low level details will enhance even a web-res photo. It really crisps up those resizing algorithms :)
RT @toddowyoung Tutorial: 6 Steps For Sharpening In Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
Reading: Tutorial: 6 Steps For Sharpening In Lightroom:
Although all images are going to have slightly di… http://bit.ly/9fmiLb
Great tutorial. It’s very helpful Thank you for sharing this.
Excellent post Todd.
I also use Lightroom myself and since it matches perfectly my workflow.
Thank you for sharing.
ion
Right had a blast seeing @OLNband tonight gonna put @toddwyoung's http://bit.ly/9LHpzG @Lightroom tutorial to the test.
[...] Well I could talk on but I’d rather send you on to Todd (via ISHOOTSHOWS.com) and read his Tutorial. Here’s another 100% crop just for [...]
Tutorial: 6 Steps for Sharpening in Lightroom http://bit.ly/ccQ9LC
hey Todd
have u ever used APPLE Aperture for your photo manager ? can u compare it between Lightroom and Aperture ?
hehe,thanks todd
regards
Mikhail
Hi Mikhail,
No, I’ve never used Aperture, so I can’t compare.
RT @toddowyoung Tutorial: 6 Steps For Sharpening In Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LX3zr
Good tutorial from @toddowyoung: 6 Steps For Sharpening In #Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LHpzG
RT @TrevMorrisPhoto: Good tutorial from @toddowyoung: 6 Steps For Sharpening In #Lightroom http://bit.ly/9LHpzG
A great follow up to your ‘Understanding Sharpening in Adobe Lightroom‘. I never knew about the preview shortcut, nor the fact that LR ignores in camera sharpening so this old dog is still learning new tricks! You write really well and talk the sort of language that photographers can really understand – a bit like Lightroom! I have recommended your site on my WP featured blog – https://johnhootonphotography.wordpress.com/links-2/ because you offer the best photographer to photographers content that I have seen.
An excellent follow on to your previous tutorial on sharpening. Very helpful walking us through the example here. Many thanks…
im just about to move from NX2 to LR3
thank you for sharing this great informations
LR3: Sharpening……http://goo.gl/Kixwj (12/14)
So many people are using lightroom now for there workflow but i just cant get the feel for it.
This sharpening tutorial by @toddowyoung has been pretty helpful. http://t.co/AE7tbgm
Hi Todd,
Thank you ever so much! Your Articles on how to sharpen Images in Lightroom was a real Eye-opener to me. I tried to apply some of your tips to some shots I made while visiting New York last spring. I’m flat out amazed :D
Greetings from Switzerland
Luke
Hi Luke,
Really glad to hear that this tutorial was helpful for you. Thanks for the comment.
[...] UPDATE: View the 6 Steps For Sharpening In Lightroom. [...]
[...] verscherpen verscherpen update [...]
Hi Todd, I dont get it at all! For me, only setting which works is amount around 25-50, radius 0.5, detail 100, masking 0. This somehow corresponds to PS unsharp mask with radius 0.3 which works really well. ANYTHING else makes totally shitty digital looking wet edges look when you zoom in. There could be exeptions – portraits, where you dont want to sharpen all the skin – but you have to make it manualy, the masking function in LR is no help. I understand the big radius sharpening could work for enhancing detailcontrast, but then it must be applied aditionaly to small radius sharpen or you get the totaly no small-scale edges at all. So only option here is unsharp mask in PS again. Large radius is also good when you plan to make a small web picture, but then, much better way is the sharpening on output, which sharpens the precise resolution you want. Large radius could also work if you have misfocused photo or very-high-iso blurry image. NOWHERE ELSE I find reason to use diferent setting than I stated above. Am I missing out something important or why do I think completely different?:)
I dont get it at all. For me, only setting which works is amount around 25-50, radius 0.5, detail 100, masking 0. This somehow corresponds to PS unsharp mask with radius 0.3 which works really well. ANYTHING else makes totally shitty digital looking wet edges look when you zoom in. There could be exeptions – portraits, where you dont want to sharpen all the skin – but you have to make it manualy, the masking function in LR is no help. I understand the big radius sharpening could work for enhancing detailcontrast, but then it must be applied aditionaly to small radius sharpen or you get the totaly no small-scale edges at all. So only option here is unsharp mask in PS again. Large radius is also good when you plan to make a small web picture, but then, much better way is the sharpening on output, which sharpens the precise resolution you want. Large radius could also work if you have misfocused photo or very-high-iso blurry image. NOWHERE ELSE I find reason to use diferent setting than I stated above. Am I missing out something important or why do I think completely different?:)
It’s okay to be a special child. This was a great review.