Photo Plus - UK (2020-04)

58 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com

ADOBE CC

THE MISSION

Improve your

post-production

workflow with

these sharpening

tips and tricks

Time needed

15 minutes

Skill level

Beginner

Kit needed

• Lightroom


• Photoshop

The sharp end

James Paterson explains why sharpening should bookend your

Lightroom workflow while showing you how to use some essential tools

harpening is an

essential part of image-

editing, but it often

leads to confusion over

what tools to use, when to

sharpen and how much to

apply. As such, it can be

helpful to think of

sharpening as part of a

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in this tutorial. Along the way

we’ll perform initial sharpening

and noise reduction in Lightroom,

then take our image into

Photoshop for retouching to

remove the distracting leaf. Then

we’ll round-trip back to Lightroom

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sharpening stages, one at the

beginning and another at the end.

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Capture sharpening. This involves

general sharpening to correct for

inherent softness in the image, or

to crisp up important details. It’s

best done in Lightroom’s Detail

panel (or in the near-identical

panel in Photoshop’s Camera

Raw). Capture sharpening can

sometimes amplify image noise,

especially in high-ISO images.

So this is also a good time to

apply noise reduction if the image

requires it. We’ll do so here with

the Adjustment Brush, which lets

us paint in noise reduction

selectively to the areas in the

photo that need it most.

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we’ll do to our image, sharpening

is also often one of the last. This is

called Output sharpening, and

this time the aim is to optimize

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and resolution in mind – whether

that be a print size or for viewing

on-screen. We’ll use the Output

Sharpening controls within

Lightroom’s Export Dialog to

make this a simple task.

S

A F T E R

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