As I said in last week’s post, Capture Sharpening is intended to be a gentle round of sharpening to over come the inherent loss of detail during digital capture. And I want to emphasize the gentle part. If Capture Sharpening is overdone it can lead to all sorts of problems in later stages of your image editing workflow.

The Detail Panel in Lightroom’s Develop module has four sliders to control the Capture Sharpening applied to an image. The first two, Amount and Radius, affect the sharpening being applied to the overall image. The next two sliders, Detail and Masking, are used to mitigate the sharpening in certain areas of the image. The Detail and Masking sliders permit the use of higher settings for the Amount and Radius sliders because they “hold back” the effect in areas of the image that should not be sharpened–like a cloudless blue sky.

(As a side note, based on the sharpening setting set on your camera, out-of-camera jpg files already have some sharpening applied to them . This serves as capture sharpening so there is not need for a second round of Capture Sharpening. And I’ll go so far to say that a second round of sharpening will most likely do more harm than good.)

The Amount slider is like the volume control. The further you slide it, the more contrast (darker darks and lighter lights) that will be applied to the edges. And the Radius slider is used to control the width of the halo. Wider halos increase the effect. Over doing either of these sliders can give the image a “crunchy” look. This is where the other two slides come into play. Read more »

This image, of a closed bloodroot blossom, was shot on the same morning as the spring beauty that I posted last week. The water drops are from an over night rain shower.

As with all genre of photography, but especially so with close-up and macro photography, the background is as important as the subject. A strong subject against a busy background will not make for a strong image. The viewer will keep being pulled away from the subject

Here only the blossom was lit and most of the background was in the shade. Exposing for the flower resulted in the background being rendered very dark (black). Thus all the details and busyness in the background are hidden.

Only the up turned out of focus green leaf of the bloodroot caught enough light to be visible. And in this image that is important to give it context. If the background had been pure black I don’t think the image would be as strong. Read more »

This little guy is about 2 inches long. Its a sharpnose puffer attempting to hide among some colorful encrusting sponge.

Read more »

The goal of any sharpening is to create a halo that increase contrast at edges in the image. Darker darks and lighter lights at the edges increase apparent contrast that we interpret as increased sharpness. The trick is controlling the width and brightness of the halos so that they increase edge contrast without making the image look “crunchy”. It’s also worth mentioning that sharpening is not intended (and can not accomplish) to overcome lack of sharpness due to incorrect focus.

Modern sharpening practice is to do sharpening in three separate steps at different times during the workflow:

Capture
Creative
Output

While the screen shots in this series of posts come from Lightroom (LR), the same base code is used in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) so everything in this, and subsequent posts, applies equally to sharpening in ACR. In subsequent posts in this series I will go into more detail in how to implement Capture, Creative and Output sharpening in LR (and ACR). Read more »

This past week I’ve struggled to identify the subject of a series to follow the Death Valley series. Then it hit me. This has been a particularly hard winter here in Southeastern Pennsylvania with 4 major snow storms , 3 of them with accumulations over 20″. So what better way to “escape” the cold and snow than to view images of beautiful wildflowers. For the next few weeks I will be posting some wildflower images from last year. And as a side benefit, with this year’s spring wildflower season being just around the corner, of getting me, and hopefully some readers of this blog, to start planning for this year’s run of spring wildflowers. Read more »

Here is a cooperative Barred Hamlet I found in St Lucia.

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I messed up last week. Probably because dealing with that much snow got me out of sync. I had intended to post these images as a follow up to the Arrow Crabs from the week before. Here.

Jim Lhulier, scuba instructor and training director for Dudas’ Diving Duds, has found a cooperative arrow crab. Read more »

I’m a big proponent of using non-destructive techniques in a digital enhancement workflow. Among other things it means being able to change your mind at a latter date and to be able to modify or even completely remove an edit.   In CS4 Shadow/Highlight can be applied to an image as a Smart Filter.  And as a Smart Filter the tool’s dialog can be re-opened and changes applied at any time. Read more »