Camera Raw really is a great tool. It’s arguable though how much sharpening you want to do inside CR before you go into Photoshop for more touchups. Of course if you’re able to do all your edits inside CR you can go to town with your final output sharpening. But if you know you’re going into PS for more work, it’s probably best to go easy on the CR sharpening.
Remember that when you shoot in jpg your camera will automatically apply sharpening “in camera”. This is one reason why images can look great as jpgs, but when you open a raw file it looks flat and soft. The camera does nothing to raw files particularly as compared to “in camera” changes made when shooting in jpg.
Now by default CR will add some sharpening to every photo you open, see the 3rd panel “detail” for the sharpening controls. You really do need this “capture sharpening” to all raw images to at least get you to where the “in camera” jpg sharpening would have gotten you. The benefit of this though is you can take off or enhance this sharpening and fine tune it to your hearts content. This is of course the benefit of shooting in raw.
Don’t forget that you need to view your image at 100% to see the effect of sharpening inside CR. So choose a part of the image where you want sharpening to be applied and zoom to 100%.
There are several controls you can play with in the sharpening area:
Amount is kinda obvious…it’s the strength of the sharpening effect! The default is 25 so if you don’t want any (you may want to handle all this in PS) you can simply drag this to 0
Radius effects the hard edges of a shape and how many pixels touching that hard edge will be effected by the sharpening. You really need to play with this to get a feel for how it works for different types of images.
Detail can help with the unwanted “halo’s” you can get, particularly with heavy sharpening. Don’t go too high unless you have a really high contrast image.
Masking can be very cool especially if you want to complete your workflow in CR and now delve into PS. Masking is for controlling the edges of your image and how the sharpening is applied to them. If you press and hold the option/alt and move the masking slider all the way to the left the screen will be white. Now (while still holding the option/alt key) move the slider to the right. Everything that is appears as black is not sharpened…everything that remains white is. You’ll notice that the parts of the image which remain white are the hard edges.
So if you wanted to sharpen a portrait you could use this feature to apply sharpening to only areas like the edge of a face, nose, eyebrows, lips etc.
For landscapes/urban settings you mightn’t want this at all. Again, play with it to get a feel for how it works.
Don’t forget that you’ll get a lot more control in PS, so don’t think (or get used to) CR is the be all and end all of your retouching workflow. But do remember just how powerful it is!
Tags: camera raw, photoshop