Transcripts
1. Sharpening and Spot Sharpening in Lightroom and ACR - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, sharpen and spot sharpen photos in Adobe Lightroom and in Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the graphic design for lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today we're looking at sharpening in not only Adobe Camera Raw, but also in Lightroom and also in Photoshop so you can see how you can take the power of Adobe Camera Raw to sharpen any image from Photoshop. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students at Skillshare to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. Now for each of the images that we're working on today, I'm going to give you a copy of those images. We're going to start in Lightroom, then we go into Adobe Camera Raw, and in the last video we're going to Photoshop and we're going to see how you can harness the power of Adobe Camera Raw from inside Photoshop.
2. Lightroom Sharpening Basics: This is the image that we're going to sharpen in Lightroom now because this is a raw image, Lightroom will have already applied some sharpening to the image. If you're working with JPEG images then no sharpening will be applied. Whenever you're working with a raw imagery you will need to add some sharpening to the image because it's not done in camera. You have to do it yourself, that's part of what it is to shoot raw images. I'm going to start here by clicking on this icon and then click on an area of the image that's going to allow me to see how my sharpening is progressing. This is a one-to-one preview so that you're seeing it at more detail so it's handy to be able to look at this area here. Now, as I said, this is a raw image, so a certain amount of sharpening has been applied. I like to crank it up a little bit higher than that so I can just see it at a higher value and then back it off later on. When you adjust this amount value by holding the Alt or Option key at the same time, you'll see the image in black and white. The reason for this is that Lightroom sharpens luminosity, it doesn't sharpen color, so it's going to sharpen based on a black and white version of the image. The radius adds sort of halos around the edge detail that you find in the image. Now typically for portraits and for animals where we've got sort of soft detail, if you like, then you're going to need a higher radius than you would for buildings that have sharp edges. In addition, you're going to need to use a higher radius value if your images are a bit soft. If your camera tends towards soft focus, then you're going to need to use a higher radius if you want your images to be really sharp. Buildings lower, people and animals a bit higher. Tech sharp images a little low on the radius, slightly soft images a little higher on the radius but you're probably not want to go as high as 3.0 [inaudible] anything because that's really high. The details slider allows you to get back detail in the image, unlike radius, you can hold the Alt or Option key as you drag on details so that you can just see where the detail is appearing in your image. Now it can be a little hard to see on the screen here but I'm going to wind my detail up quite high on this image because I want to see detail in these areas in the lemma. The final adjustment and the really important one is masking. If you hold down the Alt or Option key as you drag on the masking slider, you'll see that one end of the slider, it's white, the whole image is white. The reason for this is that the entire image is being sharpened and as you drag it up, black starts to appear. The black areas are not going to be sharpened, the white areas are going to be sharpened and somewhere between zero and 100 is a sweet spot for your image and each image is going to be different. Hold down the Alt or Option key, drag on the slider and ask yourself, are the areas that I want to see sharp white and that the areas that I don't want to see sharp, black. Now this is really handy, for example, to ensure that you don't sharpen noise in sky. You want make sure that your sky is well and truly within the black area so that you're not sharpening any noise that you might have caught in the camera, for example, in sky detail. Now for this image, I don't want the background to be sharp and I do want the animal to be sharpened and so I've settled for a value of about 58. At this point now I can move back the amount, so I'm just going to move it back a little bit so that I'm not over sharpening the image at this point.
3. Lightroom Sharpening Presets and Spot Sharpening: Now, before we go on to spot sharpening, I just want to show you some presets. Over here on the left of the screen are the presets that come with Lightroom and one set of those is Lightroom General Presets. I've also got a whole lot of other presets that I've installed, but these you will have because they come with Lightroom. Inside Lightroom General Presets are two presets that can act as one click sharpening for you. So if you're finding the sharpening is confusing, or if you have a whole heap of images that you need to sharpen and do it fairly quickly, then sharpening using these one click options is certainly something that you can do. In this case, we choose faces and that would just sharpen this animal's face. If you want to do scenery such as buildings, then you could choose scenic. The problem that I have with scenic is that there's no masking for that sharpening. You would then need to come in and add some masking, which you can do by just holding the ALT or Option key and then going and setting the masking to where you want it to be. This will be particularly important in scenes where you've got blue sky or clear sky because you want to make sure that the sharpening is not being applied to the sky. Now, I'm going to wind this all back because I want to settle for the sharpening that I actually applied to this image. But those one click options can bail you out if you just want a quick and dirty solution. I'm going to look briefly now at spot sharpening. Spot sharpening can be done with the adjustment brush. I'm just going to double-click on effect just to take this brush back to no settings at all. I'm going to add some sharpening. Then I'm going to click on the image and I'm going to brush on my sharpening effect and I'm going to pick areas of the image where I want a little bit of additional sharpening. These are going to be areas that my eye is going to be naturally attracted to and that's the eyes in this Lemur and perhaps just around the nose. Now, if we turn on the mask overlay here, you'll see that this is where I've painted this effect on. Your mask overlay is going to be pink. I just made mine green. I am just making sure that I've got plenty of sharpening in the area that I wanted to be a little bit extra sharp. Turn the mask overlay off and click "Done". The places where you might apply a little bit of extra sharpening are obviously eyes, but you might also do that for metal things if you've got, for example, a rodeo. You might have horses with buckles on their bridles so you might apply a little bit of extra sharpening to that. Anywhere where you want just a little bit of extra Christmas, you can throw a whole lot of additional sharpening to that limited area by using the adjustment brush.
4. ACR Sharpening Basics: This is the image that we're going to work on sharpening here in Adobe Camera Raw. Now, I've already processed this image but I haven't sharpened it. We're going straight to the sharpening panel here. There is some sharpening applied to this image however, and that's because it's a raw file. Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom will always apply a certain level of sharpness to an image if it's a raw image. If it's a JPEG image then it's not going to be sharpened. You're going to have to apply the sharpening to it yourself. Now we're going to start here with amount and if I hold the Alt or Option key as I drag on amount, this is like the volume slider. How much sharpening am I going to apply to this image? You're seeing that the image is black and white, and the reason for this is that Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom only sharpen luminosity. They don't sharpen color, just the luminosity, the lightness and darkness values in the image. I'd like to start by cranking up amount to a fairly high level, so I can back it off again later on. Now for radius we are also going to hold the Alt or Option key. As I drag across this image you'll see that the detail in the image becomes more apparent because it's got halos being added around it. The highest value that I can drag this to is 3.0, and because this is something that would be akin to a building, I'm going to drag it down quite low. Typically, for buildings and things that have edge detail in them, man-made structures if you like, you want a smaller radius than you would, for example, for an animal or for a portrait. But just have a look and see what your slider is giving you. You want to start seeing detail, but you don't want to see really, really obvious haloing because that's just destroying your image. The next thing we'll look at is how much detail do we want to get back into the image? I'm just going to drag on my detail slider, and typically, this relationship between radius and detail is a good one for, again, man-made objects; a lower radius, a higher detail. Typically, for portraits you would go the other way, you would use a higher radius value and a lower detail value. But none of this is cast in stone, you can just do whatever it is that makes sense for you with your image. Again, I'm going to just check here and say that I've got a fair bit of detail back in the image. It's really hard for you to see that. You're going to see it much better when you are actually working with the original image, and I've given that to you so you can download and use it. Now masking is the last of these sliders, and this is a key benefit for sharpening in Adobe Camera Raw and in Lightroom because this is a slider that's not currently available inside Photoshop. What it does is it allows you to limit the sharpening to only the edge detail. Again, I'm going to hold Alt or Option, and when I start dragging on the slider you can see that the image is pure white. What that's telling you is that the entire image is going to be sharpened. But as I drag this across to the right, areas in this image go to black, and what I'm doing is removing the sharpening from those areas. Now that's a real benefit when you've got things like sky detail because if your camera shoots noisy skies, the last thing you want to do is sharpen noise in the sky. This masking slider lets you eliminate the sharpening from the sky detail, but leave it where you want it to be. Around here I've got some interesting water detail and I want to sharpen that. I'm going to make sure that my masking is going to include the water, but not the sky where it's blue. This is a pretty good value for this image, and I suggest that you practice a lot with the masking slider because it really can make a big difference to sharpening your images. Having done that I might want to come in a little bit to look at this in a bit more detail, and then just back off the sharpening a bit if it's too much for the entire image.
5. ACR Spot Sharpening: Now, if you watch the Lightroom videos in this class, and I suggest you do, because in those videos I'm sharpening a very different image. If you watch those videos, you will see that there are some sharpening presets that I shipped with Lightroom. Well, the same is not the case in Adobe Camera Raw. So you won't have presets ship with Adobe Camera Raw that you can use. Of course, you can use presets in Adobe Camera Raw, but you'd need to find, download, and install them to use. So just be aware that that is a significant difference between Lightroom and Photoshop or Adobe Camera Raw. Now, in those Lightroom videos, we also looked at adding some spot sharpening, and we're going to do that now. We're going to do it with the adjustment brush. So I'm going to click on the Adjustment Brush and I'm going to this a little hamburger icon and I'm going to reset the local correction settings so everything is zeroed out. I'm going to add some sharpness here. I could also add a little bit of clarity if I wanted to, but I'm just going to settle for sharpness. I'm going to make sure I have my brush set to a reasonable flow and a reasonable size and I'm just going to click to Pin it down. Then I'm going to brush over areas in the image that I want to apply a little bit of additional sharpening too, just a little bit of extra gloss. Now you might do this for eyes in an animal, in a rodeo, you might do it for buckles on horses bridles and things like that. Here I'm picking out this boat because it's the most visible boat in this image. I'm also going to sharpen a little bit extra in the reflections here because that was what this image was all about, the reflections and these little patterns in the water. So I can add a little bit of spot sharpening to the areas in the image that I'm most interested in seeing sharpened. But this is localized sharpening, not sharpening the entire image. If I just click here to show you the mask, you'll see where this extra sharpening has been applied, and it's something that you can just brush on and remove if it's too much by using the eraser tool here. So let me just turn my mask off and this is applied a little bit of additional sharpening to the image in areas that I think can take this little bit of extra spots sharpening.
6. Photoshop Sharpening using ACR: Before we finish up our look at sharpening, let's have a look at a special case. I have an image here that is a collage of a couple of images and I've got a few adjustment layers in this image as well. If I want to sharpen this using Adobe Camera Raw, I can't open this image in Adobe Camera Raw because it's a layered Photoshop file. So here's how I could sharpen it. I'm going to start by turning this image into a Smart Object. I'm going to select the bottom most layer and I'm going to Shift Click on the top most layer, so all the layers in this image are selected. I'll choose Filter, Convert for Smart Filters. This converts the entire image into a Smart Object, and it's going to allow me to sharpen the image, but not lose the layers that went to make up this image, in case I want to change it later on. With the Smart Object selected, I'll choose Filter, Camera Raw Filter, and that opens this entire image in Adobe Camera Raw. I can do all things with this image inside Adobe Camera Raw, including sharpening it. I'm going to bypass the basic panel, but just know that you could make adjustments using these panels as well. I'm going to the Detail area. I'm going to apply some sharpening to this image, only a little bit because it's already pretty sharp. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key and just check out the radius values. I'm going to back the radius right off for this image again, because it's pretty sharp already. I'm going to adjust the detail again, holding the Alt or Option key and just finding a good value for my detail. Finally, I'll mask this, so I'm just going to drag out the masking slider. I'm applying my sharpening to the very edge detail in the image and not in the areas of flatter color. When I'm happy with what I've achieved, I can go back and just adjust the amount to suit. When I've applied the sharpening that I want to this image in Adobe Camera Raw, I'm just going to click "Okay." This is going to take me back to Photoshop and you can see here I've got a smart filter with the Camera Raw Filter adjustment, that's my sharpening. I can turn it on or off to see the effect on the image. If at anytime I need to adjust the underlying collage, all I need to do is to click on the "Smart Object." If I double click it, I am going to open the original image here in Photoshop. It's a PSP file, which is a layered Photoshop file inside a Smart Object. Here I can turn off my adjustments. If I don't want these adjustments, I can just disable them. When I close this file by just clicking on its Close button and click "Yes" to save it, then we're going to have it back in Photoshop with the changes made to the image, but the sharpening is still applied to that image. So there's a way that you can harness the power of Adobe Camera Raw sharpening tool from even with inside Photoshop. Now this Camera Raw Filter is available in Photoshop CC, it wasn't available in Photoshop CS6. So if you've got the latest version of Photoshop, then you have the ability to use this camera or filter from inside Photoshop on any image.
7. Final thoughts project and wrap up: Before we wind up this class, can I just recommend that even if you're using Lightroom, you have a look at the Adobe Camera Raw videos, and vice versa. The reason for this is I use very different images in each of these applications, and you might learn something from the approach that I took to sharpening those images that you can take back to the application that you're using. If you do any special photo editing in Photoshop, you may also want to have a look at the Photoshop video. The reason for this is that there's a tool in Photoshop CC that allows you to use Adobe Camera Raw sharpening from inside Photoshop, and that might be appropriate for people who, for example, are creating layered files in Photoshop. Your project for this class is to take an image, either one of the ones that I've given you or an image of your choice, and to sharpen it using the application that you're using, either Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, or sharpen an image from Photoshop in Adobe Camera Raw. Post a picture of your sharpened image in the class project area. I hope that you've learned something in this class that you didn't already know about sharpening images in Lightroom, Photoshop, and Adobe Camera Raw. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which let's you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations are helpful to other students because it helps them see that they too might enjoy this class. If you would like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
