How much sharpening in LR do you use?

Hey guys.

For those of you who only use LR3's built-in sharpening.... (no other external tools) , Just wanted to see on average how much sharpening in Develop module do you guys use for most pictures, and then, in output sharpening for smaller web based jpeg exports what do you guys set it as (low, standard, high)?

i've seen some tutorials go as high as 80-90 on the Develop sharpening. that seems rather high for capture sharpening phase. i typically do 30-40 and then when exporting to web sized jpegs (like 800-1024 resolution range) i used Standard export sharpening.....

am i too conservative? whats your norms?

Generally, I do go to 80 but I also reduce radius to 0.5. And in LR3 (as opposed to LR2) I reduce Detail to 15 and set Mask to 25. But for landscapes I will push Detail up to 100 for the deconvolution sharpening and for portraits bring it down to 10 while using a high radius and small amount.

If you look in the Lightroom Presets shipped with the application you will see two sharpening presets; Wide Edges (Faces), and Narrow Edges (Scenics). I tend not vary much from around those values for Capture Sharpening in Lightroom. The reasoning behind the values chosen are explained in detail here: http://lightroom-news.com …oom-11-update/sharpening/

The only exception I usually make is to increase the default masking value from 60 to around70-80 depending on the subject.

For Output Sharpening I generally use the Adjustment Brush to selectively add Sharpness in the specific areas I want it. Then in the Export dialog box I use either Low or Standard to counteract any softness introduced by resizing the image. This is for Web display only; for prints the amount of sharpening needed comes only through lots of experience.

datadump wrote in post #11645362
Hey guys.

For those of you who only use LR3's built-in sharpening.... (no other external tools) , Just wanted to see on average how much sharpening in Develop module do you guys use for most pictures, and then, in output sharpening for smaller web based jpeg exports what do you guys set it as (low, standard, high)?

i've seen some tutorials go as high as 80-90 on the Develop sharpening. that seems rather high for capture sharpening phase. i typically do 30-40 and then when exporting to web sized jpegs (like 800-1024 resolution range) i used Standard export sharpening.....

am i too conservative? whats your norms?

It really depends on your camera model. The 7D and other 18 megapixel crop cameras require a higher degree of sharpening.

Depends on the image. How much do I want the fine detail to pop. How much pop is too much?

thanks all..

i found a site that has a little more updated page (Lr3 related, vs lr1-1) than the one pixelmagic quoted... same stuff.

http://ishootshows.com …ing-with-adobe-lightroom/

PixelMagic wrote in post #11645460
If you look in the Lightroom Presets shipped with the application you will see two sharpening presets; Wide Edges (Faces), and Narrow Edges (Scenics). I tend not vary much from around those values for Capture Sharpening in Lightroom. The reasoning behind the values chosen are explained in detail here: http://lightroom-news.com …oom-11-update/sharpening/

The only exception I usually make is to increase the default masking value from 60 to around70-80 depending on the subject.

For Output Sharpening I generally use the Adjustment Brush to selectively add Sharpness in the specific areas I want it. Then in the Export dialog box I use either Low or Standard to counteract any softness introduced by resizing the image. This is for Web display only; for prints the amount of sharpening needed comes only through lots of experience.

Other than the ability to now view sharpening at less than 100% view, nothing has changed in the Sharpening Panel between version 1.1 and 3.3 (The Sharpening function was licensed from PixelGenius by Adobe). Martin Evening, one of the members of PixelGenius, wrote the definitive book on Lightroom; I'd sooner trust his word than someone I never heard about.

Speaking of PixelGenius, their site has a cool "Tips and Techniques" page with articles in pdf format that are by some of the top names in the field:

http://www.pixelgenius​.com/tipsandtechniques​.html

PixelMagic wrote in post #11649661
Other than the ability to now view sharpening at less than 100% view, nothing has changed in the Sharpening Panel between version 1.1 and 3.3 (The Sharpening function was licensed from PixelGenius by Adobe). Martin Evening, one of the members of PixelGenius, wrote the definitive book on Lightroom; I'd sooner trust his word than someone I never heard about.

thanks for the info.

PixelMagic wrote in post #11649661
Other than the ability to now view sharpening at less than 100% view, nothing has changed in the Sharpening Panel between version 1.1 and 3.3 (The Sharpening function was licensed from PixelGenius by Adobe). Martin Evening, one of the members of PixelGenius, wrote the definitive book on Lightroom; I'd sooner trust his word than someone I never heard about.

True, but the demosaicing algorithm changed significantly from 2.7 to 3.0 and this means that the image being delivered to the sharpening stage is very different. Because of this the numbers on the UI may be the same but their effect is different. About a year ago, at the time of the release of the first LR3 Beta, various forums carried numerous posts from Eric Chan, Tom Hogarty, Julieanne Kost, Jeff Schewe (of PixelGenius) and others intimately connected with LR's design explaining that whereas LR2's initial conversion automatically did a fair amount of luminance smoothing, LR3's demosaicer is tuned to do more detail extraction, and that because of this users might want to rethink their sharpening (and NR) settings.

BTW - What was licensed from PG was the Output Sharpening, not the Develop sharpening that was designed in-house.