Okay, so I'm studying this movie in Photoshop, because I just like to have a quick look at the notion of sharpening and sort of how it works. So I've just got this graphic image here to demonstrate shopping. And I'm just going to go filter and sharpen and Unsharp Mask, the classic old shopping method. And if you look at this image, when I turn on the preview before and after, before and after, we get the vague impression that it appears to have become sharper. And if I increase the amount to say, 100, we should get even more of that impression. So let's go ahead and click OK right there.

And I'll turn that layer on and off before, after, before after. So clearly this image appears to have become sharper, but if we look closely, it's just a series of very straight lines. How can they have become sharper? So let me just undo that sharpening and zoom in nice and close. So we can actually see what's going on when we apply this Mysterious shopping. So I'm going to go again filter shopping and Unsharp Mask and you'll see that what's actually happening is the shopping tool is finding the edges in the image and it's increasing the contrast along those edges.

So you can see here we've got a slightly lighter line on on the light side and a slightly darker line on the dark side, creating the illusion of a sharper image. And there's three main sliders here we've got the amount, and the amounts kind of like a volume slider. As we increase the amount you can see the contrast is being increased more. We've got the radius and the radius controls how far out from the edge the sharpening is actually applied. So you'll see as we increase the radius, the sharpening Halo is it's often described as becoming wider out from the edge so more pixels out from the edge. And then finally we've got the threshold now that the threshold is like a dampening slider.

As we increase the threshold, what that does is it starts to reduce the sharpening from the lower contrast areas. So you'll see as I reach a certain point here, there's a lot less sharpening happening here where it's lower contrast. But we're still seeing considerable sharpening on the stage here, where it's high contrast. So this is how shopping works. This is what's happening when we look at it at first in Photoshop at this kind of high magnification level. So I'm just going to cancel out of there now, and I'm going to go across to Lightroom.

And I'm going to have a look at how sharpening operates there. So basically, images need to be sharpened at least twice. All images need to be shopping at least twice, once for capture and once for output. So I want to start by looking at the capture sharpening. So I'm just going to go I've got an image here that's suitable for this demonstration. I'm going to grab this image here and I'm just going to go into the develop module and it's already zoomed up nicely 100% for me, so I just want to look down in the detail tab here.

This is where the capture sharpening is applied. Okay, this is where the capture sharpening gets applied and I've just reset it to the default settings. So if you've never applied capture sharpening, or rather, if you've never made a decision in the detail tab about your shopping then you don't need to worry too much because the shopping is automatically applied. The shopping is automatically applied because Lightroom knows, as do all raw raw processes know that all raw files need some sharpening applied to them, otherwise they just going to be a little bit soft. So if I turn the sharpening off here completely, you can say the image just goes a little bit soft and if I turn it on, it just crisps up nicely. So that's zero sharpening on the raw file.

And that's with the default the Lightroom default sharpening. So all raw files need a little bit of sharpening to correct for this Something that occurs in the camera through the D mosaicing. algorithm and through the the anti aliasing filter. If the camera has one, increasingly they're removing them. But still, the D mosaicing is an issue. So I just put simply, the process the process of digital capture softens the image a little bit, regardless of how sharp your lenses, so a little bit of sharpening just recovers that.

So the biggest issue with sharpening is, is it someone's face or not, because sharpening brings out all the lovely fine detail in an image, which for the vast majority of images we want to happen, but with a portrait, then maybe we don't want all the fine detail of the person's skin being exaggerated. So the most important thing for sharpening is knowing whether it's someone's face or not. Now Lightroom doesn't know that by default, so the default sharpening settings are quite conservative and you'll see if we just go and have a look at that. These sharpening settings here, you'll see we've got a mount radius just like Photoshop did, we've got detail, which is the same as the threshold, but I just call it detail here. And it works in reverse. As we increase the detail, it goes more aggressively rather than less.

And then we've also got the masking which is a fourth slot, which adds a little bit of a mask to try and protect find detailed areas. There's a few little keyboard shortcuts here that people like to show off. I'm not sure that they're tremendously useful, but I'll show you anyway you hold down the Option key that's all on Windows. And if you click on the amount slider with the option, Katana converts the image to black and white briefly, just to show you that it's only the tonal information being sharpened and not the color information. If you hold down the Option key and click on the radius slider, you get this funny looking preview where it just shows you the effect that the radius is having. Same deal with the detail holding down option.

It shows you the detail it's currently been sharpened. And if we hold down the Option key on the masking equals, you can see, with masking set to zero, the whole image goes white. But if I were to bring that slide in, it's showing you the area that is being protected by the mask. So the black areas are protected and the white areas are selected. So people seem to like to play around with this little option clicking thing, I'm not sure that it's that useful, to be honest. What I find incredibly useful with the capture sharpening settings in Lightroom are these presets over here.

So over here in the presets on the Lightroom general presets, we've got shopping faces and shopping sainik. So shopping faces, looks at the image. So let's just apply shopping faces and you can see what it's done. It's given me a slightly higher amount than the defaults. It's increased the radius slightly, it's reduced the detail and it's given it a considerable amount of masking. So if we go before and after now, we can see we're still getting lovely Putting on the eyes and the various kind of high contrast areas, but the lower contrast areas like the skin are being protected.

Now if we contrast that with shopping, scenic this other preset sharp and scenic, you'll see it gets a lot more aggressive in the skin detail. So it's bringing out all this fine texture in the skin, which is what you'd want to do if this was a landscape image or a product image or, you know anything other than a portrait really. So we want all this detail, but if we got to sharpen faces, you can say it's protecting all this detail really nicely. So I think that's a great sort of help just to utilize these presets for your capture sharpening and scenic for everything other than a portrait and then faces if it's a face. Otherwise, you're just at the defaults. So that's your capture sharpening it's important to apply capture sharpening.

Now the other critical stage in sharpening is output. So output shopping is shopping that gets applied to the image at its final size. And if we go into the, I'll just jump back to grid for a moment. If I was to just jump into my export dialog here, you'll see that we also have the option. If I was to go, let's just go we've got an A 3d print preset we made earlier here of me. So let's go ahead and select that.

And you can see here that after the image has been resized to 42 centimeters on the long side at 300 pixels per inch, and our paper has been chosen. So we've can choose whether it's for matte paper or glossy paper, we can then simply choose a low standard or high amount for sharpening. Now, a lot of work has gone into coming up with these formulas for this sharpening. And there was a there was a person around many years ago sadly no longer with his Bruce Fraser, who did a lot of research into shopping right a lot of Photoshop books and so forth, and Bruce wrote a book exclusively on shopping called real world shopping. And Bruce clima did a lot of testing in shopping in print and output. And he decided that they were optimal settings for prints at certain sizes.

And he basically decided the shopping highlights needed to be between one 50th and 100th of an inch for maximum quality in print. If there are any smaller than that I'd have no effect. And if they're any larger than that, they'd start to look a bit crunchy and unpleasant. So these three presets are based on all of braces research and his photo kits sharpening presets that he used to sell a lot of Photoshop plugins rather, Adobe have got all these formulas now and I've built them into Lightroom and Camera Raw, so we can simply choose once we've decided our image size and our resolution and our paper stock, we can simply choose low standard or high sharpening and it's going to apply a suitable amount of shopping at that print size. So you can look from low to high We'll still be within the acceptable range, just the higher end of it and the lower end of it.

So this is your output sharpening. Not to be confused with your capture sharpening that takes place in the develop module under the detail tab. So it's important to be clear about that capture sharpening happens at the original capture size. Output sharpening happens at the final output size. So that's two different types of sharpening we can do to our images and it's kind of essential, it's essential that we do that sharpening. Now there is a third optional type of sharpening I just like to look at and it's called creative sharpening.

And the theory with creative sharpening is we apply it just to areas that we'd like to accentuate areas that we'd like to draw further attention to. And there's no better way to do your creative sharpening in Lightroom than with the adjustment brush. So if I go up to my adjustment brush here, and I reset all of the sliders, and I go ahead and bring the sharpness up a little Then I can go ahead and apply some creative sharpening just side to eyes. Maybe the lips, maybe if there was jewelry and so forth, then we probably got a little high there at 72 I'd say can probably bring that back down a little, maybe kind of 3020 or so. Maybe 25. Let's say 28.

We got there before, after before after. So just adding a little bit more snap to these important areas. There's an old saying that anything that you would like to sort of sparkle, then you could give a little bit more shopping to so eyes and teeth and jewelry and belt buckles and engine parts source on a plate of food, a range of different things like that. So three types of sharpening. Two of them are essential capture and output and one of them is optional and that is the the creative sharpening the optional creative sharpening that you can use, just to draw attention to certain areas with the object Brush. So I hope that's I useful roundup of all the shopping options in Lightroom and hopefully you find that useful in your workflow.