So many photo editors these days have the ability to sharpen photos. Some do a good job and some do not such a good job. Adobe Lightroom happens to be one of the applications that does a good job. As well they should. Adobe has been around forever and it’s got the necessary technology down pat by this point.
In this post, I’d like to review a few of the necessary steps needed to sharpen a photo using Lightroom. This isn’t a particularly challenging area, so I’ll try to keep this short.
The first thing you’ll need to do is open Lightroom and navigate to the Library panel. Then, select the photo you’d like to work on by clicking its thumbnail. Once that’s done, click the Develop panel link in the upper right corner of the application.
Once inside the Develop workspace, navigate to the Detail drop-down panel that’s in the right column.
Inside this panel, you’ll see the area labeled Sharpening. This is where it all happens.
Now, to actually sharpen an image, I advise you read all you can in the two posts I’ve already written on the topic. You can find them here and here. Both of these posts have good information contained in them. For now, I’d like to focus primarily on a few different features included in this panel.
1. The Amount Warning – The Amount slider has got a warning inside of it. This warning takes the form of a red gradient that’s located right inside the slider itself. It’s basically a reminder for users to not overdo the amount of sharpening they apply. Too much sharpening can make a photograph look very bad, hence the red gradient.
2. The On/Off Switch – If you look at the header of the Detail panel (where the word “Detail” is and where the white triangle is), you’ll notice a small switch that sits over to the left. This is an on/off switch that allows you to quickly view and hide any sharpening changes you made to the image. This is helpful because oftentimes we become blind to our edits in applications such as this one. With a distinct on and off capability, we can more clearly see what’s going on and what we’ve done.
3. The Reminder – When it comes to sharpening an image, you really need to see what’s going on. The changes are almost on a pixel level, so it’s important to have the image zoomed into at least 100%. Inside the Detail panel is a reminder to zoom the image in. This reminder takes the form of an exclamation mark inside of a circle. It’s located at the top left corner of the panel. If this warning circle is clicked, the image will zoom in to 100% automatically.
These are a few of the features I wanted to make you aware of in this panel. If you have any more tips or tricks for sharpening photos in Adobe Lightroom, please share them below. Thanks!
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