Getting Down In The Details Panel In Lightroom

smoke665

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I've been trying to learn to finesse an image with the sliders in the detail panel. Up to this point I've pretty much limited myself to the "amount slider" under sharpen and "luminance slider" under Noise Reduction and accepting the defaults on the others. Even in the best of exposures I'm finding that there can be some funky elements in the shadows. I'm learning that there's a whole new world of adjustment that I've been ignoring.

Under Sharpening the radius, detail and masking can really drill down on where and how the sharpening is applied. Under Noise Reduction, I'm learning to use the Detail, Contrast, Color, Detail, and Smoothness. Understanding how each of these work to has taken sharpening and noise reduction to a new level for me.

While no images are completely identical, I'm working to develop a preset that's based on "types" of images (portraits, landscapes, etc.) that will give me a starting point. Anyone else out there do this? Anyone else have any preferred settings?
 
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So if you want to know about the sharpening panel in Camera Raw & Lr see:

I'll look into this, but there have been significant advances in both sharpening and noise reduction in the 9 years since this was published. I have to wonder at the relevancy in today's world.
 
This tutorial on noise reduction and sharpening in ACR/Lightroom really helped me understand how to correctly use the Details panel without getting too lost in the weeds. The real eye opener for me was the masking slider when sharpening - before I learned how to use it correctly I rarely used this feature, as it just seemed to add noise, but if masked correctly it can be used to simply sharpen edges, which is usually all we want to do in the first place.

How to Sharpen High-ISO Photos
 
This tutorial on noise reduction and sharpening in ACR/Lightroom really helped me understand how to correctly use the Details panel without getting too lost in the weeds. The real eye opener for me was the masking slider when sharpening - before I learned how to use it correctly I rarely used this feature, as it just seemed to add noise, but if masked correctly it can be used to simply sharpen edges, which is usually all we want to do in the first place.

How to Sharpen High-ISO Photos

Learning that holding down the Alt key while manipulating sliders gives me a gray image that visually depicts which pixels are being affected was the eye opener for me. It's so much easier to learn to use something when you can actually see what's going on as you make the changes.

Both sharpening and noise reduction have a symbiotic relationship. Changes made to one affect the other, so its important to work with the panel sliders as a group. I use masking to control sharpening in the larger bodies of pixels which will I as you mentioned push tbe affected areas toward the edges, but radius controls how far from an individual pixel the software affects other pixels, and detail works to limit the effect to the high frequency areas (edges). As you know, sharpening introduces noise and reducing noise decreases sharpening, so its important to follow through carefully on noise reduction adjustments. Increasing Luminance smooths out the contrast variations between individual pixels, but the higher you go the more detail you lose. The Luminance detail slider attempts to regain contrast in the fine details, while the Luminance contrast does somewhat the same on the larger pixel groupings. The color slider works on the variations between pixels, while detail seeks to retain those variations in fine detail. Color smoothness works on the larger groupings of pixels to ease the transition between colors.

Sharpening for me has become a combination of sharpness adjustment and noise reduction adjustments, be it in the Detail Panel In Lr or as Keith mentioned in the Camera Raw filter in Ps.
 
And then when you export a photo from LR to a final JPEG or TIFF you get to sharpen again.

I keep my input sharpening light-handed and then output sharpen as the use dictates. It can get tricky especially as you note when images are also noisy. C1 gives me the ability to apply any of the detail (noise reduction and sharpening) adjustments locally to different parts of the image which I like to be able to do -- no point sharpening a noisy shadow, but still at the input stage I don't know how the image will be used and I'm not sure I want to create multiple sharpening variants in C1.

So I generate an output file from C1 and then output sharpen (and noise filter) as a final step before use in a pixel -level app like PS. To be able to apply the sharpening locally I'm partial to sharpening methods that I can mask so I often use frequency separation sharpening in PS.

Joe
 
I keep my input sharpening light-handed and then output sharpen as the use dictates. It can get tricky especially as you note when images are also noisy.

Yup, Lr gives you the option to sharpen for screen, glossy or matte paper, and low, standard or high at export. How much exactly that is in each category I've yet to fully understand. I try to keep the sharpening as low as possible for global, and if needed locally then use the adjustment brush.
 

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