Male Portrait III

[Manfred M]

I attempted to sharpen under LR. In the detail tab in the Develop module. If I am not doing this correctly, please point me in the right direction.
Thanks.

Bruce

Are you working at 100% image size? That is the ideal setting for sharpening. If you are using a smaller level, you really can't tell what you are doing.

[lovelife65]

I struggle with sharpening in LR as well. I think you can only use LR for small amounts of editing and if it’s off out of camera it seems to be a struggle. But of course I don’t know LR as well as I should. You have certainly done better than I would have Bruce. I do wonder what happened to the top of his head tho. Seems to have been cropp d off a bit.

[Digital]

Are you working at 100% image size? That is the ideal setting for sharpening. If you are using a smaller level, you really can't tell what you are doing.

Manfred, I went to Photoshop; increased size to 100%.
Still does not match the quality you did. If you used PS can you give me your settings.
Any suggestions.
Thanks.

Bruce

[Digital]

I struggle with sharpening in LR as well. I think you can only use LR for small amounts of editing and if it’s off out of camera it seems to be a struggle. But of course I don’t know LR as well as I should. You have certainly done better than I would have Bruce. I do wonder what happened to the top of his head tho. Seems to have been cropp d off a bit.

Sharon, If I knew what I was doing I believe LR would do just fine in sharpening. The problem is that I do not know what I am doing.
Part of the subject's head was trimmed to remove a portion of a wall clock.
This pic was not really intended to be a very good portrait. It was made so I could practice bouncing an on-camera speedlight off to the side of the subject to determine the influence of the lighting. I am practicing Neill van Niekerk's methods of lighting for portraiture.


Bruce

[Cantab]

Part of the subject's head was trimmed to remove a portion of a wall clock.
This pic was not really intended to be a very good portrait. It was made so I could practice bouncing an on-camera speedlight off to the side of the subject to determine the influence of the lighting. I am practicing Neill van Niekerk's methods of lighting for portraiture.

Bruce

Bruce, even though you did not intend to produce a good portrait, I think you've done so (as I've said before) -- despite the sharpening issues. All it needs is a bit of cloning and removal of the distracting items on the wall as Richard did. That way you won't need to remove part of your subject's head.

[Digital]

Thank you Bruce for your kind comments.


Bruce

[Manfred M]

Bruce - I use the Unsharp Mask (USM) method in most of my sharpening. I have disabled sharpening in Lightroom / Adobe Camera Raw.

I will go through the most common approach I use in sharpening. Sharpening works by enhancing areas of contrast, i.e. where there are dark tones adjacent to light tones by making these areas wider and more intense. If you oversharpen, you will notice halos (this is bad).

Unsharp mask has three settings:

1. Amount - this sets how strong the sharpening will be. I tend to be in the 80 - 120 range here.

2. Radius - this controls how wide the halos are (in pixels). I tend to usually work in the 0.7 - 1.5 range

3. Threshold - the is a setting that controls the amount of noise introduced by sharpening. I tend to run with this set in the 1 - 4 range, although you can certainly go higher. I don't think I've ever gone past 8.

As mentioned before, I sharpen all my images when viewing them at 100% in Photoshop.

This is something often referred to as "input sharpening" and it counters the softening caused by the anti-aliasing filter in your camera (if it has one; some higher end more modern ones don't) and the de-mosaicing process in the raw conversion.

In landscape work I will often choose to NOT sharpen water or the sky as they often work better when they are a bit softer.

I will often do additional local sharpening, especially in portraiture work. This will use the same tools, but I apply the effect locally through the use of layer masks in Photoshop. In portraiture, I will often do some additional sharpening of the irises and hair (including eyebrows and eye lashes for women). I sometimes do this in the faces of older men to give them a bit harder look. This step is often referred to as in-process sharpening.

If I am printing, I will also do another global sharpening after I have prepared the image for printing. The images are often upsized to print, and that does result in a bit of softening. I don't do this for web based images, as these are downsized so tend to look a bit sharper, regardless through the downsampling operation.

Note: Watch for the following during sharpening. If they occur, cut back the amount of sharpening you are doing.

1. Colour shifts.

2. Noticeable white halos

3. Notieceable wide halos

4. Overintensifaction of details or noise.


I hope this helps.