Three Types Of Image Sharpening

do you sharpen your images I actually sharpen my images in three different ways so hang out and I'll tell you what they are based on questions I get image sharpening seems to be a little mysterious for many photographers it was for me too until I learned about three types of sharpening from some master printers the main person I learned from is my friend Mac Hulbert Mac is one of the guys who pretty much pioneered digital photo printing along with Graham Nash yes that Nash from the band crosby Stills and Nash and they created a company called national cameras or inkjet photo printers the other two people are John Paul Caponigro from one of its excellent printing tutorials and Jeff Shoei in his book the digital print I'll link to all these guys down in the thing in this video I'm going to explain what these three types of sharpening are however it's not meant to be a class in how to sharpen off to save that for an actual class or a much longer video sharpening is a challenging thing to teach because it involves many variables including the camera used the content of the image your personal creative intentions and the size and format of the image a lot of it comes down to personal taste and also depends on if images will be viewed on screen or printed and if printed what size and what type of print now before I continue it's worth reminding ourselves that digital sharpening is really just an optical illusion that makes images appear sharper by skillfully increasing the contrast along edges but it isn't able to bring back details that aren't already there the three types of sharpening in my workflow again thanks to Mac Hulbert and the others are input or raw sharpening creative sharpening and output sharpening let's start from the top input or raw sharpening is what I do initially to my RAW files in Lightroom using the sharpening section of the details tab this is to enhance fine edges and details that lose some sharpness through the act of taking a digital image cameras are getting better all the time but RAW files are generally not as sharp as they could be or as sharp as your good lenses input sharpening is very minimal is intended to establish the fine details at the beginning of the workflow Lightroom actually has a default input sharpening setting so unless you change it your images in Lightroom already have input sharpening applied it's very slight so you really don't notice input sharpening unless you zoom in to 100% magnification Lightroom gives you for sharpening controls a mount radius detail and masking where you set these sliders depends on how much camera resolution you have how much fine detail the image has and what you like however for most of my images I tend to set a very low radius a higher amount of detail and then I adjust the amount slider until the edges look good at a hundred percent without over sharpening or bringing out artifacts in images that have a lot of smooth areas such as sky or water I hold down the alt or option key and then slide the masking slider until the smooth areas are masked out or black but the edges are not masked out or white and that's what input or raw sharpening is and once I have the input sharpening set for an image I rarely come back to it after that the second type of sharpening is creative sharpening this sharpening can be done throughout the workflow as you choose and it's used to emphasize or de-emphasize certain parts of the image enhance specific details or increase or decrease clarity it's important to note that this type of sharpening might actually involve blurring or reducing clarity in parts of the image for effect creative sharpening or D sharpening can be done with the Selective adjustment tools in Lightroom and the texture clarity and D haze adjustment sliders it can also be done in Photoshop using selections layer math or luminosity masks and a variety of different tools for sharpening and clarity such as high pass filters edge filters sharpening filters and blurs they're also quite a few non Adobe apps that have creative sharpening tools as well but I don't use any of those so I can't really tell you about them we're not finished developing or processing an image including the input sharpening and any creative sharpening or blurring that I choose to do I call that my master image file and it lives on my hard drive waiting for me to do something with it anything I decide to do with it are called outputs I might output it for screen viewing on my website social media or in a slide presentation I might also output it as a print which could be large or small and it could be on any number of print media such as photo paper aluminum canvas fabric or just about any other material these days I create a special copy of the master file for each of these different outputs and I sharpen each of them specifically for that output appropriately this third type of sharpening is called output sharpening when I create an output copy for screen viewing I personally use the DK panel I just entered the size and pixels I want it to be and the panel sizes and sharpens the image for me and it does a much better job than simply sizing and sharpening with either Lightroom or Photoshop alone I'll link to a couple of videos below that show how use the TK web sharpener in more detail print output sharpening is more challenging than screen sharpening this is where image size and print media along with the image content and your taste all come into play my basic process is to make a copy of the master size it to the print dimensions and then sharpen this print file in Photoshop i duplicate the background layer and then I use the smart sharpen filter this allows me to decrease opacity of the sharpening layer if the sharpening is too much it also allows me to place a mask on the sharpen layer and mask out the sharpening in places where I don't want it again there are many apps out there that can help you with output sharpening for print when I size images using an app called topaz gigapixel AI and more links to videos on that below I find that it does most if not all the sharpening I need during the sizing process and I know that topaz Nick on one luminar and fix allow algorithms and probably a bunch more all have sharpening apps as well but I'm not currently using any of those so those are the three ways I think about an apply sharpening in my workflow input sharpening creative sharpening and output sharpening I hope this has been helpful as with anything I teach in my videos I'm just sharing what I do but you should try out different things for yourself and find out what works best for you as always thanks for tuning in and if this video was helpful thanks for doing all that YouTube stuff that helps out a guy like me who creates videos to help out people like you so take care and I look forward to seeing you again next time

Channel: Sean Bagshaw

Views: 17,211

Keywords: Photoshop, sharpening, image sharpening, print sharpening, web sharpening, lightroom, photography

Id: xX5zdqBuNrM

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020