November 27, 2007
I used to use Photoshop CS / CS2 for digital darkroom before Adobe Lightroom came out. CS2 provides complete solution for digital photography post processing, including batch processing (water marking, framing). Since Adobe Lightroom came out, I’ve been using it to process events and portrait pictures. It requires higher computer power but it is definitely more convenient than Photoshop in terms of labeling, ranking and synchronization.
When Lightroom 1.0 came out, one of the complain is the sharpening tool. The USM and Smart sharpening in CS2/CS3 is very powerful comparing to the sharpening in Lightroom. So most people ended up using CS2/CS3 for sharpening with pictures exported from Lightroom.
WHY SHARPENING IS NEEDED IN RAW?
The reason for sharpening RAW image is that when most DSLR camera capture RAW picture, it has an anti-alias filter to reduce the pixel grid effect from Moire pattern (see Digital SLR handbook). This is common to digital photography and picture scanning. To counter the softness from the anti-alias filter, digital camera has a built-in sharpening software to convert the RAW image into JPEG format and the level of sharpness can be customized in the camera menu. However, for most professional photographers, they prefer to do the sharpening using Adobe Photoshop because it allows precise control of the sharpness of the pictures. Also RAW saves pictures in 16 bits format where JPEG is in 8 bit format. So from the moment the RAW image is converted to JPEG, some information of the picture is lost and it cannot be recovered without going back to the RAW file. That’s why I solely shoot in RAW for all my pictures.
REAL LIFE EXAMPLE
Now, with Lightroom 1.3, the sharpening tool is significantly improved. I want to share some real life examples of sharpening between Lightroom and CS3.
The first picture is the original RAW file taken from the Canon 20D without any sharpening. You can see how soft the picture is. Sharpening is definitely needed to enhance the picture.
The second picture is sharpened using the CS2 Unsharp Mask (USM). This method sharpen the entire picture with one setting. You can tell by the face of the object, which is oversharpened due to single sharpening setting in USM.
The third picture is sharpened by CS3 Smart Sharpening. It enhances the USM in CS2 and provides Shadow / Highlight masking. So the picture can partially sharpened. It’s a big improvement over USM.
The fourth picture is done in Adobe Lightroom, with sharpening set to 100. Lightroom also provides masking (similar to Smart Sharpening in CS3).
I’ve been using Lightroom to sharpen most of my pictures and it provides great results and I can save a lot of time without jumping back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop.
