Sharpening during the RAW conversion process

I subscribe to "Aftercapture" magazine and it contains, in the recent issue, a discussion of sharpening done on RAW files when first opened as opposed to sharpening as part of the fnishing process. I had not looked at it quite that way and the article is enlightening.

You can read the article as a pdf here: http://www.aftercaptur​e.com …sharpen-or-not-to-sharpen

Dennis

Thanks Dennis, that’s an interesting article. I just watched the new Luminous Landscape video covering the Light Room 1.1 enhancements and they were discussing the new sharpening tools. They specifically mentioned that the new/improved sharpening tool is a great improvement but in their mind it should be considered capture sharpening. The implication is that this is a great place to start, but for their workflow, they will still apply additional sharpening in Photoshop.

Capture sharpening is usually advocated as part of a "three stage sharpening" workflow.

Capture sharpening is to remove the softness caused by digital capture - and nothing more. The next stage is creative sharpening - which is optional and often only applied to part of an image (this isn't something you can do in Lightroom - you need Photoshop or similar). Finally, there's output sharpening - the parameters of which depend on the device you're going to use.


In Lightroom 1.1, Lightroom got the great capture sharpening features of Adobe Camera Raw 4.1. However, the output sharpening facilities are still rudimentary; in the Print module only you have Off, Low, Medium or High - and that's it! Hopefully that will get improved in the future.

David

In the same video Jeff Schewe inferred (without going into much detail) that output sharpening was definitely being worked on and at some point in the future, it will be fixed.