Sharpen up your shots

Find out why sharpening should bookend your Lightroom editing process – and explore the tools you need

Sharpening tools are essential in photo-editing, but it’s easy to get confused over which tools to use, when to sharpen, and how much sharpening to apply. To get this right, it can be helpful to think of sharpening as part of a wider workflow, as I’ll show here.

We’ll perform initial sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom and take the image into Photoshop for a little retouching to remove the distracting leaf, then roundtrip back to Lightroom for final sharpening. Our workflow involves two distinct sharpening stages: one at the beginning, the other at the end.

The first stage is called the capture sharpening. This involves general sharpening to correct for inherent softness in an image, or to crisp up details. It’s best done in Lightroom’s Detail Panel (or in the same panel in Camera Raw). Capture sharpening can sometimes amplify image noise, especially in high-ISO images. This is also a good time to apply noise reduction if the image needs it. We’ll do it here with the help of the Adjustment Brush, which lets us paint in noise reduction to specific areas.