From the course: Mastering Adobe Camera Raw

Sharpening your photo

From the course: Mastering Adobe Camera Raw

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Sharpening your photo

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- Our next set of controls is all about detail. Details that you want and details that you might not want. Taking advantage of sharpening and noise reduction is quite useful to refine a photo. Let's go to this first image here and in order to make this useful, I strongly suggest you use a magnification of 100%. That will pop you in and really let you judge the details. If you can't do 100%, then go with 50% or 200%, but you really want to avoid the fit to image option, or anything that is not 100 directly divisible or multiplied by two. This makes it very difficult to accurately judge what's happening on the screen. 100% is clearly the best option. You can hold down the Space bar if needed and pan around on the scene to really judge what's happening and take a look at the default values with detail. Here, some sharpening was automatically applied. No noise reduction for luminance noise, but a little bit of noise for color. I'm going to turn off the clipping indicators now because I don't want those getting in the way as I make refinements. I suggest you twirl each of these open for more precise controls. Now let's start with sharpening. As we increase sharpening, it brings out overall edge detail, or reduces it. Look at the metal edges. Generally speaking, as you play with this, you want to be careful as you get to a higher value. This could lead to overprocessing, but instead of doing it globally, we can actually push it quite a bit further, as long as we refine the edges. Let's pop in here to 200% for a moment to really judge this. As we move this, look at the changes to those edge details, like the stitches. Now what we're going to do is look at radius and detail. This affects the transitions. I suggest as you refine these, hold down the Option or Alt key. It's much easier to see what's happening, and this is really emphasizing certain parts of the edges. Same thing here with the Option or Alt key on details. You can see how we're really sharpening and bringing that to life. What's most important though, is masking, and as you drag this, you'll see that the black areas are the areas that are falling off. For example, we can really refine just the edges of the stitching, the texture of the fabric in the middle. This will let us be much more aggressive with the overall change because it's not going everywhere without width. Look at the change there in this rivet and the metal edge. Looks soft, looks clearly defined. Sharpening is not about focus. People sometimes mistake that they could fix an out-of-focus image. What happens is with the raw sensor in detail, the decode doesn't always hold the edge detail. This is particularly true on metal surfaces or things that just have a high contrast at the edge or transition. Sharpening can really help with this. Let's switch to the second image here, and same thing. I'm going to punch into 200% and hold down the Space bar and look at the waterfall. As we increase sharpness here, it has an effect on the water. You can see as we drag back and forth. But it's also introducing some artifacts. Hold down the Option or Alt key and tweak the mask. What you want to do is really control what's being affected. For this part, it is okay to zoom out to the whole image, so you can really see the mask globally. And what I'm doing is just refining it, so it's the edge of the trees, the edge of the rocks and the edge of the water. This really gives us good emphasis on just the edge detail. Now let's zoom back to 100%. Looking at the image, I'll come back now to detail and holding down the Option key, refine the radius and the detail amount. This lets me be nice and aggressive to really bring out those edges. And if we toggle that off and on, you can see how the water and the edge of the rock is really brought to life. That's quite effective. Again, this is a pretty deep scene, so you're not going to have tack sharp focus all the way through because this was a single exposure. When you see those landscape shots that are perfectly focused, that's often three or five photos with different focal points that are merged together, sort of like how you merge a panorama or an HDR. But still in this case, the sharpening controls really help refine things a bit. Now that we've got the edge detail right, let's go on and explore noise.

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