What is Sharpening?
Sharpening is basically how clear your photograph is when being viewed.
You’d think it would just be a case of getting your photograph in focus and that is it … but there is a little more to it than that.
When you set your camera to save your photographs as jpegs, the camera will add some sharpening to your photographs, and through the creative styles/profiles, you can set the amount of sharpening on your photographs.
However, when you save your photographs as RAW files in camera, this is basically just the data from the sensor. When you bring your photos into lightroom or whichever editing program you use, you do have to add this sharpening before exporting your final edited photograph, otherwise it might seem a little soft.
Why Add Sharpening Afterwards?
Sharpness gives a photograph that was taken well, just a little bit extra pop that it might be lacking. Knowing how much to add is a very personal thing … some might not think I add enough and others might think I add too much, but it is something you develop over time, to your personal tastes.
You can by all means leave the sharpening alone, but your images will end up softer than they potentially could be, so it is worth adding a little, after all, editing is a way of bringing the best out of your photos.
How to add Sharpening in Lightroom
In lightroom, I’ll assume you know how to bring your photos in to the program … if not, click on this video here to learn how to do that. It is pretty straight forwards and doesn’t take too long.
Once your images are in lightroom, go to the develop module. This is the tabs on the top right hand side of the lightroom app.
Once you are in the develop module, you will see some dropdown panels on the right hand side, under the histogram.
Once I have painted this on, I’ll add some sharpening in the mask dropdown menu. With this, I will add up to about 10-30 again … any more than this and it might look a little too oversharpened, but this is all down to personal taste.
If you start to see a white halo around your edges, this is a sign that you are oversharpening your photos … it is sometimes hard to see when you look at the image as a whole, but when you zoom in, you will see it, and this is why you have the 100% square in the detail panel.
So if you are thinking your photographs are looking a little soft, then try adding some sharpening with the detail panel and see if you can get more out of your photographs.
If you’d like to watch a video on this where I go into detail with specific examples click on the video below … just be aware that it is in the older version of lightroom before they changed the masking panel … but between the video below and this article, it should all make a lot more sense … I also go into detail about the noise reduction options in the detail panel as well …
