Usually when we take a portrait, there are particular details of the subject that we want to stand out. Isn’t it already pretty clear what we want the viewer to look at? Well, sort of. We have a subject sitting in front of a plain background. We mentioned earlier that sharpening is there to help us guide the eyes of the viewer to the more important areas of a photo. That is to say, the Adjustment Brush allows you to apply edits to small portions of an image. The Adjustment Brush in Lightroom is sort of like their answer to Layer Masks in Photoshop. This is fine for general sharpening, but what if you want more control? Well, let’s check out the Adjustment Brush. The Sharpening sliders will give us some amount of control as to how the image is sharpened, and they will sharpen the entire image. Masking: Will sharpen detailed areas in a photo (like eyes or hair), while avoiding smoother areas (like skin).Īnd it’s as simple as that.Detail: Adjusts sharpening, but on a much more granular, pixel-by-pixel scale.A higher radius will sharpen larger details, a smaller radius will sharpen smaller details. Radius: This option allows you to control what size details you want to sharpen.Amount: Raise or lower this slider to control the overall amount of sharpening in the image.
You’ll see a series of sliders, each providing a slightly different level of control. Navigate to the Develop Tab and then scroll down the right panel until you find the Detail section to find the Sharpening options. General Sharpening in Lightroomīasic sharpening in Lightroom is pretty easy. Let’s take a look at the sharpening process and Lightroom and see if this comparison holds true. It certainly has tools for both global (the entire image) and local (a smaller portion of the image) editing, but they’re just not as quick and flexible as their Photoshop counterparts. Where Lightroom tends to lack in comparison with Photoshop, is in it’s ability to make small, carefully targeted adjustments.
Not only is it a powerful editing software, but it’s also the best solution for quickly importing, organizing, and culling hundreds, or thousands, of images at a time.
Many professional photographers spend most of their post-processing time in Adobe Lightroom.
But we can still break down the different tools each software offers, and also answer the ever-important question: which program does it better? Sharpening in Lightroom We’re sticking with Lightroom and Photoshop because they’re what most people will be using when they want a professional-grade finish. Not only are there several options in both Lightroom and Photoshop, but every photo app on your phone has sharpening options as well. We’ve all likely seen sharpening tools before. So once you’ve adjusted the exposure and color to fit the photograph, sharpening is your final step to making sure that attention goes exactly where you want it to. Sharpening is simply the process of carefully increasing the contrast of particular areas of an image.
Our eyes immediately try to find the sharpest part of an image, so we tend to see the center woman first. Which face does your eye see first? This example is exaggerated, but the woman in the center has sharpening applied to her face, while the other two women have a slight blur. What we’re most concerned with today as that last bit. When we look at a photo, we tend to first look at areas that are brighter, areas that are more colorful or saturated, and areas with higher contrast. And our eyes are naturally drawn to certain characteristics in a photograph. So most photos we take could use just a bit of general sharpening in post-production to compensate.īut more importantly, most steps in the photo editing process revolve around one key goal: to guide the viewer’s eye to the central subject of the image. But why would we need to sharpen? The subject is in focus after all.įor starters, unless you’re shooting with extremely expensive and high-end gear (which nobody should have to worry about using unless you’re shooting top-end commercial work), cameras and lenses will almost never provide perfectly sharp in-focus areas. Sure, we can go through the process of editing the image, adjusting exposure, color, and maybe removing some distractions and blemishes. Let’s say we’ve taken a photograph, a portrait, and our subject is perfectly in focus.