When to Sharpen?

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Ok, been a while since the last post but I think it is time to get back to sharing good stuff! I will try and post at least one helpful photography tip a week. If anyone has something they would like to share, please let me know and I will post it.

This week the topic is about sharpening. I ran across a few articles on sharpening and denoise and have a better handle on these topics. FCC has come a long way in the digital age and I feel there may be a need to update many topics.

So what is sharpening? Basically there are 2 types of sharpening, presharpening and output sharpening. Sound confusing? Not really. Presharpening is for a RAW image. A RAW image does not have any sharpening (unlike a jpeg) and NEEDS to be sharpened. If you are going to just look at the image on your monitor, you are basically done. But if you resize the image or decide to print, there is a need to Output sharpen.

Resized images may need a tweak to the sharpening and prints definitely need sharpening for that process. Output sharpening is done LAST.

Along with presharpening is denoise. Both of these processses should be done early in the workflow, along with Camera RAW Filter. You can do the entire process in Lightroom or sharpen and then use something like Topaze Denoise AI. I have experimented with each and the results are close. There is a good YouTube on the Lightroom process by Steve Perry, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMYh5grOBa0. He is pretty detailed on the topic but I find his website and Youtubes are practical for his type of photography.

If there is an interest to this topic we can always schedule a Zoom tutorial session. Thanks, Jack Martin