How to Sharpen Images in Lightroom Classic

let's take a look at sharpening techniques in Lightroom classic we'll compare images using both the traditional sharpening techniques as well as working with texture and Clarity sliders sharpening a Lightroom classic coming [Music] up hi I'm Terry vanhein professional photographer and today I'm going to show you how to sharpen your images inside a Lightroom classic now I'm going to include links in the description below to the actual raw files that I'm working with here today these will come across this nef files since I shoot Nikon cameras this is the Nikon raw file system if you have an updated version of Lightroom classic you should have no problem importing them into your Lightroom catalog and working on them yourself now I shot these images myself as with all my images are copyrighted so don't go publish them to your social media when you're done they're all free to download so you can work along with me and see the same results then you can apply those same sharpening techniques to your own images now before I get started I want to be clear that Sharp Images begin in the camera while you can fix images that are a little soft to make them a little bit better nothing in post-processing will take the place of using proper camera techniques to get Sharp Images when you use the the proper camera techniques to get sharp images in the first place then add to that what you're going to learn here today in post-processing these steps will yield nice razor sharp images now if you're not sure how to get sharp images in the camera in the first place then check out my ebook razor sharp nature photography this ebook goes into great detail on one subject only sharpness there are chapters on choosing the proper shutter speed to match the lens you're working with and how defraction can make your images appear soft how to properly use focus stacking and tons of other information and pro techniques to maximize the sharpness of your images now I've sold this instantly downloadable ebook all over the world on every continent even Antarctica so thank you for those who've supported this Channel and have already purchased it it's only available on my website imag light.com I'll leave a link in the description below so you can pick up a copy if you like now let's get into Lightroom classic and learn about sharpening all right we're inside a Lightroom here and we've got the picture of a turtle so the first thing we're going to do here is we're going to make a virtual copy so we're going to rightclick and go down and create a virtual copy and the reason we're doing this is because we want to be able to create some different versions of this image so we can compare them and we don't want to get confused as to which one we're working on so let's go ahead and we're going to color code this with red so now we've got a virtual copy of this one here we're working when we go into the develop module we have a couple of options you have fit 100% And then you have this slider right here and this slider you can leave it 200% or you can now it depends on your size of your monitor it depends on the uh images that you're working with but for this presentation today I think I'm going to probably put it at 300% which is a pretty big enlargement and and you know you probably don't necessarily have to do that but just for follow along purposes I put this at 300% that way we can kind of zip between 100% And 300% 100% is what you're typically going to do most of your Sharpening at maybe a little bit more so you can really see the detail of what you're doing so here for YouTube today we're going to actually zoom up to 300% and see what we got so when we come over into the basic panel the very first thing actually let's go ahead and zoom this back a little bit the very very first thing that we're going to need to do in the basic panel is do a little bit of improvements in our exposure so we're going to bring the exposure down just a little bit we're going to bring our highlights down a little bit and now we're going to move up the lift the Shadows so that's looks a little bit better in terms of what we're what we're trying to work with here so we've just worked on this image real briefly in the basic panel so the next thing we're going to do is go down and go to the detail panel so let's go to the detail panel now typically when you bring in an image it's going to have some sharpening already applied to it and it depends on the image it comes it's generated from the camera so this is saying oh this is the type of processing that we want to do on this so what I want to do is I'm going to zero this out so we can actually compare you know exact things right so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take this and if we slide this over now we don't have any access to these other sliders so let's leave this where it was and then move these sliders completely over they're all zeroed out except for radius and now we can move sharpening back down so let's go over to our very first one and make sure that we've done the same thing we're going to slide all those over and now that way when we compare these two we can compare Them Apples to Apples so first thing we're going to do is we're going to zoom up we don't do sharpening in this kind of a mode this is not the mode where you're going to do sharpening you're going to go at least 100% or in this case today on YouTube we're going to do 300% so this is going to zoom up quite a bit to give us a really good close version of this Turtle so the first thing we're going to do is start moving our slider so we can move the slider however we want and see what kind of process it's creating on the image to sharpen it but you can't really tell as well but the key that you're going to really like using here in sharpening in Lightroom classic is the option or the ALT key if you're on a PC if I'm holding down the option key and I slide this look what happens it turns it into a monochrome black and white image right and the reason it does that is because it's a little easier to see sharpening and details when you're just looking at a black and white version you're not getting distracted by the color so this is a way that you can use the slider and get a feel for what is actually being sharpened so in this case what I generally like to do is we don't really have a feeling for what's being sharpened yet I just come over here tap on this number and I type in 90 so that's my starting point we can always adjust this later if we like the next version down that we're going to go to is the radius and as we slide this we also can see that there's some difference of sharpening that's happening but in If We Hold that option key down now watch what happens now you can see kind of a almost a line drawing of this right so if we go too far and you can see all the noise that we've introduced into the background and some really jagged lines around the turtle's head so what we're going to do is we're going to pull this back and get it to sharpen just a little bit but before it goes too crazy so probably about uh I don't know 1.5 something like that all right so that's our sharpening that we've got so far if we turn this little eyeball off you can see what we've done now we got got to go into detail again we're going to hold that option Alt key down and slide this and if we slide it all the way over you can see all the noise that we've just introduced so we don't want a bunch of noise if we don't have to so we're going to slide this over start getting some more detail around the eyes and the face and just before it starts getting too noisy so this is ends up being about 26 now we're starting to get a pretty sharp image here now the last one here is probably my favorite it's the masking one now if we slide basking around different things are going to happen but you can't really tell again holding that option or ALT key down and we slide this now Watch What Happens look at this it shows us The Mask so Lightroom is saying anything that's white we're going to sharpen anything that's black we're not going to sharpen so if we went too far here we would just get a few lines that would be sharpened and that's not going to work for us so we slide this back and say okay I don't want the background sharpened so let's get this to the point where the background is pretty black and now we can let it go and that's our mask of our sharpening so if we bring this back to 100% we can see that this is a pretty decent sharpened image from what we started with so let's go ahead and do a quick little comparison we'll compare these two and we can zoom up to see what we have here so let's go ahead and zoom this up to let's go up to 300% or thereabouts so our original with no sharpening is over here on the left let's go ahead and hide this maybe give us a little more space to work with this one here is the one with no sharpening and this is with sharpening so you can see quite a difference that we made in the sharpening on this and uh this is a technique that you're going to use when you're sharpening your images so we bring the image in we just put in in a mount slider now if we go back here let's go back to this image here go into develop we come to our amount this amount is going to make a difference as to how much we're sharpening right so one of the things you don't want to do is you don't want to oversharpening image because it it's it's really apparent when you're looking at it that it's oversharpened so now we can see what we've done here okay we've sharpened it we like it this was originally set at 90 which is pretty good but let's pull that back just a little bit cuz we don't want to over sharpen it probably get it to around 74 so that's our sharpening on an image so those are the steps you go through it doesn't take that much time but it takes the image to another level of making it a lot sharper that people are going to view it at so here's something that I found that's kind of curious so check this out let's take this same image and we're going to make another virtual copy so we got all the sharpening that we just did now what I want to do is change the color of this so it's a little easier to see we'll make that one yellow so we have a yellow one we have a red one and a yellow one both the sharpening techniques are the same on both of these okay so let's go ahead and we're going to do one more virtual copy here and we'll make this one blue all right so this is our first one and we take this first one here and we say we want to do a crop so one of the things that Lightroom does for us is that it puts the panels in order now those this order is not random this order is important because you probably really should be doing things in this order as opposed to jumping around and going right to one of the other panels you want to work your way down the panels to get the best processing you can so if we see up here at the top well there's cropping right you want to do that first right it's one of the first things you're going to do so let's go ahead and do a crop and we'll crop this in probably about there we're going to move the turtle's head to be over in this quadrant of the uh rule of thirds and we'll hit okay and now we can see that this is the crop version so let's go ahead and C copy that make a virtual copy again and we'll make that one green all right so we go in here we can see that we have we have our original and then we have now our crop version and now we have this version which is cropped as well so what we're going to do with this one is let's go ahead and open it and we're going to go into our detail and we're going to slide all those sliders back so now what we're going to do is we're going to start over with this one if we we're going to leave all of our basic changes we're going to leave those but we're going to redo our sharpening so let's go into detail and we'll start with our sharpening again and we're going to go up to 90 and then we're going to do the same thing we're going to move this up to 300% or thereabouts and move our radius so we're holding the option ALT key down sliding this over getting to a point where we want to see detail sharpened in the face and eyes but we don't want to get too much sharpening going on in the background probably right about there and then detail here we're holding it Alt option key down slide this over and again we don't want to go too extreme and come back a little bit probably about 25 or so and then masking let's take a look at our masking we want to make sure that most of the Turtles face is going to be sharpened and we don't care so much about the background all right so let's take a look at these two if we come in here this is the one we we sharpened first then we cropped and then this is the one that we cropped and then sharpened so it's a different order that we did that in so let's go ahead and compare those let's take a look and you can see between the two so this is the red one that was sharpened originally and then cropped and then this was the one that we cropped and then sharpened if you look close you can see we're starting to get some jaggedness and some little aberration around the edge here because we cropped it after we sharpened it so in this case this is much smoother so when you're going to go in this tells me that we need to do things in order right so we want to be able to when we're working on our images we want to go into an image and we want to go to develop and depending on what we're doing with our images we're going to work our way down do a few Basics if we're going to crop Now's the Time to crop crop early any your retouching things masking you're going to do that first now speaking of masking let's go ahead and take this and show you how this works so on this is our original remember there wasn't any cropping done on this at all let's go ahead and make a virtual copy of this and we're going to we probably don't need to but we we're going to go ahead and give it a new color we'll give it purple this is the purple version of the original so again we want to do and take um our exposure down a little bit bring our highlights down bring our shadows up and here's our image the way we like it so now what we're going to do next is we're going to do masking right so let's go in here and go into masking in fact you know what let's crop first cuz we we already learned it's better to crop first than to do any of our work so let's go ahead and crop this as best as we can there we go now we're going to go into masking and a lot of times this is a version of a way to do sharpening on a mask right so we'll select subject and it'll select it didn't do a perfect job so we could go in and remove some of this stuff by brushing it out but that's not important today as long as this is mask out now as we scroll down here we can see that we have all these panels right we have our tones we you can do different things with the tones and color and so on you know all this already but if we go into uh detail right here then our sharpness we can slide and start doing our sharpness so let's go ahead and get zoomed up where we were before and we can start doing our sliders so let's hold the option key down ALT key and see oh look at that when you hold the option key down you don't get any detail control well how about on the on on noise nothing Moray wait a minute these aren't even the same panels all right so this is doesn't give you all the freedoms that you have in sharpening the way you normally would so this is not the best way to do things yes you're only sharpening on your mask but you only have am Mount and you just kind of have to guess you don't have any of those controls you had before so I don't think masking and then sharpening on that mask really gives you much in my opinion I think it's better to have more control and then going in the natural way of doing our sharpening let's take this original and we're going to make a new one we'll do create a virtual copy and we're going to let's go through our same system that we just did I'll go through it real quickly we're going to turn this into a red and then we're going to do a quick develop on it change the exposure down a little bit highlights were down a little bit Shadows were lifted a little bit and we cropped right so let's go in and crop this now we have a crop version let's go down to our detail make sure we're we don't have any sharpening done applied yet so now we have this one we're going to make a virtual copy of this and we'll mark that one yellow the only reason I'm color coding this is a little bit easier to track when you're doing a comparison you can look down at the bottom and see which one we're working with so you don't get them confused so on this one is going to be our normal sharpening so let's go into detail again and we're going to start at 90 type that in and we're going to bring our radius up I think that was 1.3 our detail we're going to hold the option key down hold the option key down move our slider get to the point where we like it without too much noise masking slide that over mask just out the turtle and not the background and now we've done our sharpening on this image now on this image here here what we're going to do is try a different technique so let's come up here go to basic and inside basic you have the ability to work with presence which is texture and Clarity so let's start sliding our texture over now so these I want you to think of these as mostly contrast control so as we work on these and we start doing contrast we can move the texture up we can take our Clarity and move that up a little bit and start getting a deeper Clarity on this and then de ha so that's another one that handles you know kind of micro contrast I don't think we should move that too much because it's a it's a little brutal looking so let's go ahead and compare these two one that we sharpen traditionally and one that we are working with so the red one this is the one we sharpened traditionally and this is the one we used the sliders from the um texture and Clarity and you can see it's quite a bit jagged it's pretty nasty this is sharp the eyes are sharp the face is sharp this is not sharp so those are not techniques that you want to use for sharpening you want to do actual sharpening inside a Lightroom classic not going in the texture and dehaze or excessive dehays or excessive Clarity that's not going to help you all right this pretty much makes sense right so here's another shot of this uh wood duck this is the original I haven't done any work on this at all so let's let's go into develop module and the first thing we're going to do is go down to detail and make sure that we are slid down all the way so we're starting from scratch and let's go back up to basic and we need to lighten this up a little bit so let's go ahead and bring up the brighten it a little bit and then we're going to take our shadows and lift the Shadows a little bit probably add a little bit of color to this so we'll increase the saturation there I like pretty good maybe just a little more on the exposure there we go so now let's go ahead and do a virtual copy of this right click make a virtual copy and this one we're going to do as oh well let's make that one red so we have two versions no sharpening on either one let's go ahead and do our sharpening again we've done this before so it should be pretty simple we like our basic panel we're not going to crop anything on this one go in the detail and bring our sharpening out we're actually going to type in 90 and get our starting point and then go to radius let's go ahead and zoom this up so we're looking at uh let's go to 100% so we can see this duck's head so one of things when shooting people or Wildlife is the most important thing is getting the eyes sharp right so this is what we're going to focus on here is the eyes and how sharp they are so as we hold this option key down and we slide the eye is what we're looking at right the ey is what we want to see sharp and then we go in here and we go to detail and we bring that over so again we can probably bring this up to 200% get us a little closer and take a look at that again we'll go to radius yeah that's pretty good one 1 point1 detail starting to get detail but we're starting to get noise so we're just kind of finding that happy medium and then we're going to do our masking right so let's Zoom that back just a little bit again hold the alt or the option key down and we slide and again what we're looking for is getting the duck's head we don't care about the background and probably about like that so there's our sharpening done just like that let's compare that to what we just started with you can see here this one here is red so this is the sharpened one and this is the unsharpened one let's get Zoom that up that's at 100% let's Zoom that up to about 300 and you can see the eye real clearly lot of detail little bumps around the eye the edge of the eye the animal this one soft so our sharpening was great we like that and if you have questions or want to share your techniques for sharpening images in Lightroom classic do that in the comment section below I read and respond to every comment so I will get back to you if you'd rather contact me directly feel free to send me an email at Terry imel light.com and I'll get back to you that way thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: Terry Vander Heiden

Views: 14,493

Keywords:

Id: yqru0RCaAi0

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024