Lightroom sharpening.

Roy Mathers

Hi there

Does anyone use Lightroom for sharpening on a regular basis (as opposed to sharpening in Photoshop)?

What are the pros and cons?

Manticore

Actually, I found the sharpening in Lightroom to be woefully inadequate, and noise reduction is weak too. Actually, noise reduction, sharpening and a host of other issues has caused me to abandon Lightroom. I think of it as a 'rushed to market' product that isn't ready for prime time. I'll check it out if/when they release an update, though, as I think it has a lot of possibilities. Just isn't there yet.

thebigsky

I think the sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom are targeted at images that need a little tweaking as opposed to rescuing due to poor focus or poor exposure.

Charlie

BenA2

thebigsky wrote:

I think the sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom are targeted at images that need a little tweaking as opposed to rescuing due to poor focus or poor exposure.

Correct. I find LR does an adequate job sharpening general photos to my taste. And, shooting with a Canon SLR, I don't really find the need for noise reduction. I'm still taking special images to PS for USM sharpening. And, if I need noise reduction on a P&S image, that goes to Noise Ninja.

There's a lot of expectation out there that Adobe will either improve these features in a new version or allow third-party developers to take care of it for them. I'm looking forward to that day. But, for now, I'd say LR works for about 98% of my SLR images.

Roy Mathers

Thanks for the comments guys. It seems that you all confirm my belief that sharpening (and printing for that matter) is still best done in CS2.

mdavis

Having waded through the first of about 30 podcasts on the Lightroom beta offering which consists of interviews with photographers and Adobe engineers, it is apparent that Lightroom will be deficient in several areas due to the way in which it is coded. It is based on the ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) engine. As such, it is not intended for use with plug-ins or features to allow selections. Lightroom is a meta-data editor that acts to modify or apply changes in a separate meta-data code to apply to the entire image. Photoshop, on the other hand, is a pixel editor that allows changes to individual or groups of pixels. They are completely different except that both allow global changes to an image.

Most sharpening experts (Bruce Fraser, et. al.) agree that sharpening is best done in stages depending on the final output. The better plug-ins (arguably better than Photoshop's built in tools) will not be usable in Lightoom. The Lightroom sharpening feature is designed for super fast workflow and generating quick proofs and contact sheets for evaluation, not necessarily for final work output.

ratcheer

I was about to purchase Lightroom, last week. I decided to first go to Adobe's web site to get more info about the product.

What I found is that they do not claim it to be an all-around photo editing tool, but instead their approach is that it is to be considered an adjunct to Photoshop CS. Lightroom's primary function seems to be the management and conversion of raw image files. Heavy-duty editing tasks are still considered to be in the realm of Photoshop.

In other words, they want you to buy both. I didn't purchase Lightroom because I was looking for it to be a "baby" Photoshop. That is apparently still Photoshop Elements. I will stick with the GIMP for a while longer.

Tim

marlof

True, Lightroom is not too good at pixel level manipulation. But for me, who likes to do as little post processing as possible (I have more fun outside with my camera, than inside with my computer), I seem to able to do almost everything I need to do with images using Lightroom. I don't sharpen for web viewing other than LR sharpening and resizing, and print sharpening is done with Qimage anyhow. All I'd like to see is some perspective tools, to help in architecture shots, as the Silkypix RAW converter can do. Like this, we all have our specific wishes.

mdavis

marlof wrote:

All I'd like to see is some perspective tools, to help in architecture shots, as the Silkypix RAW converter can do. Like this, we all have our specific wishes.

Because Lightroom is a metadata editor, it is incapable of doing any selected pixel manipulation such as transforms and perspective which acts on a subset of the total image pixels. I liked the product very much, but for me, a hobbyist who tweaks each image individually and who doesn't shoot hundreds of identically lighted studio images, Lightroom does nothing that I cannot do with Bridge, ACR4 and Photoshop, which all come in one package. $250 is simply too much to pay (IMHO) to duplicate tools available in the new Bridge and ACR4 in order to speed up my workflow a little bit. It is designed for pros who don't do (or don't like to do) image enhancement in their computers. It is a fine product, but not for those of us who need Photoshop for final output on nearly every image.

CatOne

Lightroom is really a replacement to Bridge, rather than to Photoshop. It is best when considered in that light.

Sharpening in 1.0 is known to be pretty cruddy. LR 1.1 I believe will actually use the Pixel Genius tools (by license) for sharpening, so this should be a substantial improvement to what's in 1.1. No idea of an ETA for that.

wellman

mdavis wrote:

Because Lightroom is a metadata editor, it is incapable of doing any selected pixel manipulation such as transforms and perspective which acts on a subset of the total image pixels.

I'm not sure this is true. Lightroom has pretty good cloning and healing tools, which are selected-pixel manipulations. The difference is that the action is recorded as part of a pathway to just-in-time rendering rather than being incorporated as "real-pixel" edits in a layer.

wellman

Manticore wrote:

Actually, I found the sharpening in Lightroom to be woefully inadequate, and noise reduction is weak too. Actually, noise reduction, sharpening and a host of other issues has caused me to abandon Lightroom. I think of it as a 'rushed to market' product that isn't ready for prime time. I'll check it out if/when they release an update, though, as I think it has a lot of possibilities. Just isn't there yet.

Podcasts and blogs by the Lightroom team hint that they know sharpening is an issue and will be addressing it in a future release.

As for noise, it's not Adobe's strong suit anyway. I'd take Noise Ninja or Neat Image over the noise tools in PhotoShop any day. I keep waiting for Adobe to purchase some better technology. PictureCode has indicated plans to develop a Lightroom plugin once the SDK is released.

wellman

And yes, I am the official DGrin Lightroom fanboy.