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Thread: Feather Sharpening - Radius/Detail in Lightroom

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    Default Feather Sharpening - Radius/Detail in Lightroom

    I am feather sharpening challenged in Lightroom.

    To get feather detail...... what is your recommendations for slider usage, particularly radius and detail sliders. I am not looking for values, but what to look for when sliding.

    Here is what I do now:

    Amount: I just slide it up to where it looks excessive, then back off a bit (if I make the radius smaller than 1.0, I go further, less Amount if radius is greater than 1.0)
    Radius: If the bird fills the frame, and I want FINE feather detail (as always) I make the radius .9 first, then adjust Amount. My logic (please comment here) is that the individual feather vanes are so close together that I need narrow sharpening and that is achieved with less than 1.0 radius.
    Detail: I usually leave this alone as it looks awful when a use this slider..... I am sure I am doing something wrong as it is called "feather detail" no?
    Masking: After I set my other sliders (amount/radius/detail) I hold down Alt and move the slider until the background/sky is masked out so I am not making smooth surfaces like the sky mottled.
    Then I go back over the sliders tweaking each.

    Help! Tips? What is wrong with my thinking. I am not even going to ask what to do if I then apply some noise reduction (but I would love to hear an opinion on this).

    Peace
    Bruce in Philly

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    Bruce- a good general rule of thumb is to apply noise reduction early in your work-flow, and sharpening late. If you sharpen before NR you end up sharpening the noise. If you NR after sharpening, you negate a portion of the sharpening.

    The sliders you mention (e.g., Detail) indicate that you are asking about sharpening in Camera Raw at the Raw processing stage. Here you need to be gentle with sharpening because you are at the beginning of your workflow. At this stage, the sharpening is designed to be "capture sharpening", which means just a little amount to counter any softness due to the Bayer array and the anti-aliasing filter. Adjusting the sharpening amount "to where it looks excessive, then back off a bit" would not be considered gentle sharpening!

    In my opinion, capture sharpening of a high-quality image at the raw processing stage is unnecessary, so you should be thinking about sharpening after you have processed your image and optionally down-sampled it for the web.

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    BPN Member Don Lacy's Avatar
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    HI Bruce are you using a Lightroom only workflow
    Don Lacy
    You don't take a photograph, you make it - Ansel Adams
    There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs - Ansel Adams
    http://www.witnessnature.net/
    https://500px.com/lacy

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    Yes, LR 4 now 5 as of last night. By the way, I am finding LR 5 buggy... wait until the update to upgrade as it really is no big upgrade in features.

    I don't print, or very rarely, but I do downsize pics for my blog: http://travelthroughpictures.com/

    I only sharpen in LR based on what looks good to me on my calibrated 24" monitor.

    I suspect you all are going to give me a good "talkin' to". OK, I can take it. I want to get better.

    Peace
    Bruce in Philly

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    What John said.

    The best time to think about sharpening is when you make the image. There is little that can be done to make a soft image sharper; you can only tweak fine details that are already reasonably sharp. You can often make things look somewhat "sharper" (i.e. enhance fine detail) with the Structure slider in Nik's Viveza.

    Always look at an image at 100% when doing NR or sharpening. (Some people like to use 50%, which will lead you to slightly overdo it -- sometimes desirable if you are desperate to salvage an image.)

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    BPN Member Don Lacy's Avatar
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    Bruce here is my sharpening routine since I do not use Lightroom and I am not very familiar with it not sure how helpful this will be to you.
    Initial sharpening is applied in ACR during the raw conversion usually set at the default setting and then I use the mask slider to apply sharpening only to the areas needed.
    Once the image is imported into PS I will do all needed adjustments and save the unsharpened image as a master file I will then size the image for output and sharpen as the last step.
    For web images the image is downsized then a selection made of the subject on a separate layer I then use smart sharpen at 50-70 and a radius between .03 and .07 for birds depending on the feather detail. Two things to remember at no point do I ever apply global sharpening and by using a selection you can eliminate halos. In a Lightroom workflow I would paint in the sharpening with a soft brush.
    Don Lacy
    You don't take a photograph, you make it - Ansel Adams
    There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs - Ansel Adams
    http://www.witnessnature.net/
    https://500px.com/lacy

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