Brushing on Sharpness in Lightroom 3

I have found that sometimes I like brushing on sharpness in lightroom 3, rather than sharpening the whole image. When I go to brush on sharpening, the slider goes from 0-100. What kind of sharpening is that? Is that just 100% sharpening at radius 1. Can you adjust that with a more detailed panel or are you stuck with the slider and the preset sharpness?

I also understand that I can mask the image in the detail tab, but sometimes I just want a little more control.

Thanks in advance.

The brush sharpening is whatever is set in the Detail panel sharpening, so it's more of whatever you already have. I read this a couple months ago over on the Luminous Landscape forum when the question was asked and answered by Eric Chan of the LR design team. Something that occurs to me now is, what if you want only brush sharpening? Can you set the sliders in Detail and then toggle the panel off and still get brush sharpening? I'll have to experiment.

ya, that was what I was thinking. If you set your sharpening in your detail panel, then brush on sharpening you are double sharpening the image already. I will experiment with this as well.

Thanks for the answer though!

I've never read up on what the sharpening brush does, and Elie's question hits home, and also, what happens when you turn the sharpening brush into a smoothing brush? I've used both with some pretty good results, but I don't know how they work and certainly can't explain them to someone else.