Tip – An Unexpected Lightroom 3 Sharpening Tip
Over the last couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to test drive the Lightroom 3 Beta before it came out. I spent a pretty decent amount of time kicking the tires but there’s one little feature/tip that I didn’t find out until this week. Before the Lightroom 3 Beta, when sharpening you had to be zoomed into 100% to see the effects of the sharpening. If you weren’t you wouldn’t see any change. But now in the Lightroom 3 Beta you can see your sharpening even at the lowest zoom level. Cool huh? Have a great weekend!
Lightroom can sharpen at two different points in the workflow. The purpose of each is different. The first, in the controls talked about in this post, you are doing “capture sharpening” where you correct for the slight loss of sharpness due to the anti-aliasing filter in most cameras. This sharpening is dependent on the subject photographed and your artistic intentions. It is independent of the output device.
The second sharpening phase, “output sharpening” is done just before you export or print your images. The purpose of this phase is to preemptively correct for the loss of sharpness that happens during output — for example the dot gain of your printer or press. This sharpening is relatively independent of the subject photographed, but is very dependent on the output device.
You might find it best to only use the sharpening option that is provided on the final export screen. Sharpening should be a final step for many good reasons.
hi
i’m new at using lr 3 beta or lr in general and i can’t seem to find the sharping tool .. would you be so kind to tell me where i can find it?
I really am looking fwd to that. Working on a 15″ mbp when having to zoom in to 100% you don’t get to see much