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 »