From the course: Lightroom: Developing Raw and DNG Files

Sharpening your photo - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Lightroom: Developing Raw and DNG Files

Start my 1-month free trial

Sharpening your photo

“

- [Instructor] When working with an image, we frequently need to add some detail. Let's explore bringing out some of the edges in this great industrial-like image. However, there is something that bothers me about this image and so I want to adjust the crop tool here and attempt to straighten this a little bit. What we're going to do is just rotate slightly using those guides and that helps me get this image looking a little bit straighter. There we go and I'll press return. Now, let's go to the details section. To start, we're going to explore sharpening and as I drag, you'll notice that it adds or subtracts the edge detail. Sharpening is useful for that. Now you don't have to use these basic tools. If we click to open here, you'll see more controls. Now I'll hold down the option key or the alt key and you see how we get this great grayscale preview. This helps me refine things. For example, I can see how aggressive it is with the radius and how much detail it's bringing out. The key, though, is masking. Tightening this up prevents you from sharpening areas like the sky or large flat areas. What I want to do is mask this so it's not affecting some of the areas like the flat concrete surface and most importantly, the sky. Now we can be much more aggressive with our sharpening and radius and it's quite effective in bringing out the edge detail. If we toggle that on and off, you can definitely see it, and better yet, zoom in with command or control plus. This'll let you really look at what's happening as you make those adjustments, and that's quite effective. I'm just going to back off the detail and radius a little bit, and I like what that's doing. Let's try this on another image here. In this case, what I want to do is bring out some of these great textures here in the space suit, so by using the sharpening slider you can see how that brings it back. What's most useful is that you zoom in a little bit, so you can press command plus to zoom in to better judge what's happening. Pay attention to your sharpening as you add or subtract and you can see the pattern forming up. Usually, you're going to increase this a little bit. Again, the option or alt key can be useful so you can better define what's being sharpened and view the amount of detail and the radius as you adjust. Let's zoom back out here and that's definitely helping. I'm going to back off just a little, but there overall change is a welcome one. If we toggle that on and off, it's subtle, but you can definitely see that the texture is coming through. I'll increase the radius and the detail there a little bit, back off masking, and I definitely can see that in the seams and in the textures. It's looking good.

Contents