I go back and forth between the preview mode and the full-color mode, and I aim for a rendering that emphasizes the levels of detail that are most important in the image. It's no coincidence that Adobe orders the sliders the way they are the first variable I change is the overall strength of the sharpening using the Amount slider. Whether these are the fine details in a landscape or the eyes in a portrait, understanding this hierarchy will help you sharpen with purpose and efficiency. Thanks to lens performance and the relatively low ISO, there's plenty of detail to look at in this show of Girl Talk – perfect for a little sharpening tutorial.īefore adjusting any of the sliders for sharpening, I think that one of the key aspects of the process is to determine the key details and elements in the image that are most important to reading the image. This image was made with the Nikon D3 and Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 – here are the details: In this sharpening exercise, we'll take this shot of Girl Talk at The Bamboozle 2010. For these reasons, in my workflow, I keep these defaults and use them as a starting point. These are fairly conservative settings that are broad enough to work for most images in adding clarity and revealing detail.
Lightroom's default sharpening for images is as follows: Starting With Lightroom's Defaults – 25-1-25-0: Now that we've covered all the mechanics of sharpening, let's put this all together with six simple steps for sharpening in Adobe Lightroom. Although all images are going to have slightly different sharpening needs, a regular workflow for sharpening will help you optimize your images consistently.