Go from soft images to tack sharp IN LIGHTROOM Classic and ADOBE CAMERA RAW

0:00 Hey everybody and welcome to this week's video. Do you wish your photos had just a bit sharper look when you look at them on the computer? You've done everything that you can do in the field but would like to squeak out a little bit more sharpness in processing. Or when you try to sharpen your photos in processing, you seem to make the noise in an image worse and make the photo look worse than before. In this video, I'll explain what sharpening actually is, what sharpening your photos actually does, and several ways to do it properly in Lightroom Classic or Adobe Camera Raw. Stay for my bonus tip, and I'll show you how the texture and clarity sliders are related to sharpening and how to use them the right way so you can have photos that look like this and this. Try to open up your mind sometimes.

0:47 You'll be just fine. So, what is sharpness anyway? This is actually harder to define than it looks. But in general, it's the ability for the viewer to perceive detail at a very fine level. This can be affected by many variables. Lens quality, sensor resolution, and the resolution left after cropping. Shutter speeds used, amount of noise, and the quality of the light when the photo was taken. When the variables are well put together in the field, this usually translate to images like this one, which we would call sharp. Now, this photo of mine of a common ider I took with a Canon R5, a 45 megapixel camera, and a 500mm F4 lens, one of the sharpest lenses that are out there. And as you can see, the photo looks very sharp even without any significant sharpening done.

1:34 There is a small amount of default sharpening done in Lightroom for example when you uh load in images. And as you can see the photo has a lot of detail even when cropped up to such a small amount. If I go back you can see how deeply I'm cropping. I'm cropping deeper than I would for usual photo processing. But one thing here I want to point out what is sharpness and how is it really magnified in the field. The fact that this bird is lit from the left hand side is creating these ridges in the feathers. And that ridge of very bright compared to a very dark little shadow right next to it. That micro contrast is really what we perceive as sharpness. If I zoom in even to 400%, which is a much more than you need to in any processing or or visual visual treatment, you can

2:19 see these lines of bright and dark next to each other. the sharpness of those lines is what we perceive as sharpness. So I'll go back and uh for something like this, you know, you would only crop it, you know, something like this. But of course, that looks very, very sharp. And you can apply a little bit more sharpening. And I'll just zoom in a little bit more here. And as you can see, if I slide down here and slide the sharpness slider, you can see a little bit more detail coming out. And here you can really see that when I move the sharpening up, you can see that detail pop a little bit more. So, first and foremost, we should always try to get sharp photos in the field. The better your image when you start post-processing, the better result you'll be able to get from your photo.

3:05 And why do we need to process images for sharpness anyway? Well, that's because your raw images from your camera, if you are shooting in RAW, start off their life needing a bit of sharpening. Some cameras have anti-aliasing filters in front of the sensor to prevent more ray which softens the image. So sharpening your photos and processing is a normal part of photography. Now what happens when we sharpen an image in processing? I'm using Lightroom Classic here, but the same controls are in Adobe Camera Raw if that's what you use. I've created an image here with a gradient between a light gray and a dark gray using Photoshop and imported it here into Lightroom. I want to show you what happens when you add sharpening. If you look at the sharpening slider here in the detail panel, if I slide this to the right at this resolution, you really

3:51 don't see anything happening. But let's do something extreme. Let's zoom in to 1,600%. That is a lot. Now, look what happens when I move the sharpening slider to the right. The sharpening process in post-processing usually is taking the light area and making the edge a little bit lighter and taking the dark side of it and making it darker. So, what you see here happening when I'm moving the sharpening slider to the right is I'm creating almost a a white line on the light gray side and a very dark gray line on the darker side. And that edge and contrast on that edge will help us perceive this as a sharp edge, which improves the sharpness of the image. So, now that we know what's

4:36 happening here, let's have a look at a real photo to see what happens. I've got a photo of a juvenile cheetah here that I photographed in Botswana last year. And if I look at the photo a little bit closer, you'll see this looks quite sharp out of the camera. The conditions were good, my settings were good, I had enough shutter speed, I had plenty of light, and I had a very sharp lens on a high megapixel camera. So, everything looks pretty good here. And if I sharpen the image here, and we look at it at this resolution, which is 100% zoom, you can see the image get a little bit sharper. Now, something with the sharpening slider in Lightroom you have to be cautious of is oversharpening. If I move this too far to the right, the image starts going downhill in quality. what I call looking crunchy. And it's

5:22 because it's starting to look a little bit pixelated. You can't see it very well here, but let me zoom in much more. Let's zoom into 400%. And if you see here, as I move the sharpening slider to the right, at some point in the midpoint here, it looks better than it does when I started. So, let's go back to the bottom. Still looks a little bit soft there. If I go about halfway, starting to get some definition. But if I go all the way to the right, starts to get pixelated. So that is issue number one with sharpening is don't go overboard. At the point where the image starts to break down is the time to stop. But there's another trick here in sharpening in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw which is really really important and this is using the masking tool. Now on the bottom here of the sharpening tab there

6:07 is a masking slider and I'm going to show you how that works. If you press alt on a Windows PC, that would be option on a Mac, and press alt and then slide the masking slider, it creates a masking effect. And what it will do is areas that are in focus will be in white, and areas that are more out of focus will be in black. And this is often a very good way of differentiating your subject from the background and the rest of the environment. And the way it works is the areas in white will be sharpened and the areas in black won't. So what you do is you hit alt or option on a Mac take the masking slider and slide it until you get some differentiation between the subject and the background in white and black. Then you apply the sharpening slider. And

6:53 what's happening here is only by applying the sharpening to the areas in focus. You avoid the issue of making the background where often noise will be more present making it worse. So alt hit the masking slider and there I'll get that nice balance and then I'll apply sharpening. Let me zoom in a lot here just to show you what doing it improperly looks like. If I zoom in to 400% and I've to put the masking slider all the way down and move the sharpening to the right, you'll see on the background here on the right, you'll see that I'm sharpening the noise in the background and making it much more apparent by sliding the masking slider to the right. Look what happens. I actually clean up the noise in the background while leaving the subject quite sharp. So, the trick here is I

7:40 like to zoom in quite a bit more than I need to. Uh, but let me just back up a little bit here, maybe to something like 200%. I like to have the face of my subject visible as well as the background. I use the masking effect to mask out the background. And then I adjust the masking slider until I get a good balance of sharpness on my subject and not introducing too much noise to the background or the balance of the image. Now, you may be wondering about radius and detail. These two sliders have also been implemented. And uh if you remember earlier when I showed you the line between light gray and dark gray that was uh getting more contrast set up to it. The radius is how far out from that line do you want that to go. I actually don't play with these a lot

8:26 because they are designed by Lightroom to be the right amounts based on the megapixels of your camera. So when you have a higher megapixel camera, what 1.0 zero in radius looks like is actually a different number than a low megapixel camera. So, Lightroom is smart enough to figure out what is the ballpark right amount for both radius and detail depending on the megapixels of your camera and sets them accordingly. So, I tend not to use those at all. By the way, if you're wondering who the sponsor of this video is, it's me. I just launched a new course on processing your wildlife photos in Lightroom Classic. 29 modules and 10 hours of video content. I'll even include 25 of my own raw photos for you to process along with me as part of the course. I'll show you how to go from this to this, and this to

9:12 this. We even have an introductory price discount offered, too. And if you'd like to be able to take photos like this, this, and this. I'm even giving a deeper discount if you want to buy a bundle of this course and my previous course on taking better wildlife photos in the field. Wildlife photo essentials. They make a great combination to take your wildlife photography to the next level. Taking great photos in the field and processing them like a pro is a winning combination. You can see the first module of both courses which describes in detail what's included in the courses at the links below. Check them out. Now, back to sharpening our photos. Do all photos need to be super sharp? Not really. Let's start off by looking at a photo of a big crashing wave I took uh the morning after a hurricane here in

9:59 Nova Scotia. If you look at the size of these trees over here, you can tell that this is a big big wave. And uh the sun was coming up behind it. I caught it really nice. Now, how sharp does this photo need to be? Actually, it doesn't need to be very sharp. There's a lot of humidity in the air from crashing waves. Uh there's a lot of movement. So, these rocks here, do they need to be tack sharp? Let me move to 100%. Not really. Does this wave action need to be tac sharp? Not really. And in the movement, it's implied a little bit of movement. It's not super sharp. So here, you know, a photo like this doesn't need a lot of sharpness. So if I go to the develop tab and go to details, zoom up a little bit, you know, I can add a little bit of sharpening, use that masking trick a bit

10:44 to just focus the sharpening on the ends of these crashing waves and, you know, move up the sharpening a bit, but you know, it doesn't need a lot of sharpening. Here's another photo that doesn't need a lot of sharpening. I shot this photo of our pet dog panda using a mist filter. And these mist filters actually provide a lot of soft hellation to the background and a lot of glow. And as you can tell, it kind of softens the look of the subject, which is very popular in portrait photography, for example, where you actually don't want a lot of skin sharpness. So this photo has that kind of soft look, but again I can add a little bit of sharpening if I want to, but you know, you're not trying to

11:30 in this particular case trying to make it tact sharp. Having that soft glow look without a lot of tac sharpness is actually what serves the image best. Now my cheetah photo earlier had decent sharpness, so adding a little extra sharpening wasn't too difficult. My photo of the wave or my dog didn't have original sharpness, but didn't need it. What if your photo is lacking that original sharpness and it's the type of shot in which sharp detail would look good? What do you do then? Maybe your lens isn't as sharp as you'd like or the conditions included crappy light and high ISO. Cropping very deeply like we sometimes do in wildlife photography is another challenge. What do we do there? That was the scenario with this photo of mine. This is a beautiful paragan falcon, not a bird we see very commonly here where I live. So, I was really happy to get a photo. But this is with a

12:18 500 mm lens and a 1.4 teleconverter. So 700 mm. I'm probably 80 m away and this is the best I was going to get. You couldn't get any closer. It would take off. So this is what I've got and it's all I've got. And some people may say, well, if you can't get the shot right in the in camera, you know, throw it away. Well, if you've traveled halfway around the world to see an exotic species in Africa or Asia and you only got one shot of it, are you going to come home and throw it away? No, you're not. you're going to make the best of it at what you can at home. So, let me take a deep deep crop of this, more deeply than really is reasonable to do. If you look here, I'll take a very, very deep crop to try to make a photo like this. Like, what am I left with here? It's okay, but it's really lacking that crispness uh that

13:03 you really like to see out of a wildlife photo. So, what do we do here? Well, third-party software to the rescue. I'm going to show you how to use a thirdparty software, Topaz. Uh, I do use Topaz and uh, I do have a commercial arrangement with them, but this is actually not a sponsored video by Topaz. I actually use the stuff and it works and I've been using it for a few years. Topaz can be installed as a plugin. So, I go to photo edit in Topaz Photo AI. This opens up the photo in Topaz and it does an analysis to see what the photo might need for improvement. And if you look here, just by default, nothing else done to it. If I look at the before and after, what it's done here is it's done

13:49 a pretty good job of improving the sharpness of my photo, removing the noise. It's actually upscaled it by 2.14 times because it was so uh such a deep crop. And it ends up looking uh pretty good. And that is with the default settings. There are other settings that you can play with a little bit, but as you can see, with just a one click, it does a pretty good job. If I go back to the original photo in Lightroom, and if I try to sharpen this photo, as you can see, it was shot at ISO 640. So, not a lot of ISO, but if I try to sharpen the photo from this perspective, this deeply cropped, you can see that it takes any little bit of noise and just kind of magnifies the noise. So

14:34 sharpening it uh the normal way with such a deep crop in Lightroom is not really a great way forward. And as you can see here in Topaz uh photo AI, it's done a much better job. So I'll just hit save to Adobe Lightroom Classic and it will save the photo back out to Lightroom. And here we are back in Lightroom and the photo is uh quite clean and sharpened and looks pretty good. Now I will point out that using uh programs like Topaz, some of them third party software programs are based using some AI and may render your photos ineligible for photo contest. So use this for personal use as you see fit for your social media and so on, but uh be cautious if you want to enter your

15:20 photos for uh photo contest, for example. If you're interested in trying out Topaz, I'll leave a link in the show notes below. Now, what about the texture and clarity sliders? For those who have used them before, you're left with the sense that they do involve some sharpening. How does this work? Let's look at this duck photo of mine and see if we can figure out what it does. Here's a photo of mine of a malard duck. I got some beautiful water coming out of its uh off its bill as it raised its head out of the water. And there's another malard duck out of focus in the background. Now, we can do our standard sharpening here. We can use the masking trick, hitting alt or option on a Mac, creating a little bit of a mask. If I zoom in a little bit here, then we can add some sharpening and we can get a nice sharp image on our duck. But what about let's leave the sharpening all the

16:06 way down right now. And let's go back up here to under the presence tab, texture and clarity. What do they do? Texture and clarity do increase contrast similar to sharpening, but it's the scale at which it works that makes it a bit that make them a bit different from each other. If you'll notice something here, I'm going to take the texture slider and slide it to the right and see what it does to the image. At this broad scale, it hardly does anything. You can see the subject duck get a little bit crisper. The background doesn't change. Now, let me take the clarity slider and move it all the way to the right. See what happens here. Look at how the image gets darker in some places, including the background structure. Uh the background duck actually gets much more prominent in the image. So clarity introduces

16:53 contrast on a wide scale and texture on a very small scale. So for the texture slider, anything that's kind of out of focus in the background will not be touched where clarity will really change the contrast on a broader scale. So texture and clarity can be used for a sharpening element and you can use them in concert with each other. So in this particular duck, I could add a little bit of texture if I wanted. Maybe I could avoid the clarity this time. I don't want that other duck in the background to become more prominent. And you can add a little bit of sharpening. And they can work in tandem if there are nice details that you'd like to get out. But I'm going to show you here at the end my favorite tip for sharpening, which I I think makes sharpening much more effective and less problematic for other parts of the photo, is it's often

17:39 wise to apply sharpening to your subject, but not the background because you don't want to make that noise uh more prominent or you don't want to make features in the background. If it's blurry and out of focus, maybe that's the way you want to keep it. You don't want to make it more prominent. You use in Lightroom, you can create subject masks. And they were very easy. You hit the masking tab here and use a subject mask. And in doing so, we'll select your subject. And then what you do, apply the sharpening to your subject only. It does similarly to what the masking slider would do by excluding the background, but by applying the sharpening here to your subject gives you a lot of control. If you want more tips on how to get sharp photos in the

18:24 field, check out my video on that, which you can see right here. And I hope that you can use these tips the next time you go out to get your own sharp, unique, and amazing photo. I know you can do it. [Music] You'll be just fine.