Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a great workflow tool for photographers, but as it is a 1.0 release there are a few kinks that need to get worked out. A major concern for people has been the lack of any way to set the overall defaults for things such as image sharpening. I'll show you an easy way to take care of this shortcoming of Lightroom and set it up to disable sharpening automatically with each import.
Honestly what we're about to do is not at all complicated, but I've seen a number of forum posters asking how to do this very thing! The trouble lies in the fact that people are looking for an option to "save defaults" like we had in Camera RAW, but things are a little different in the Lightroom paradigm.
The Trouble with Default Sharpening
All digital camera files need to be sharpened before they can be printed due to the image-softening anti-aliasing filter that is installed in front of the digital sensor. Here's the catch: sharpening needs to be the final step in your workflow, otherwise you risk introducing some nasty artifacts into your picture. In Photoshop Lightroom, the sharpening is applied as the image is being exported for print or JPEG. This is fine if you're done working on the image, but if you're planning on additional editing in Adobe Photoshop then you would *not* want to be working with a sharpened file.
Presets to Save The Day
Lightroom ships with the concept of a Preset: a set of saved values that you can assign over and over again to different images. We'll use the preset capability and the option to apply a preset at image import time in order to effectively turn off the sharpening by default.
First, switch into the Develop Module. For our purposes it doesn't matter what image you've got selected.Now, scroll the panel on the right down to the Detail options. Take the Sharpening Amount slider and move it from its default value of 25 all the way to the left. You'll now have a value of '0' (zero) for the sharpening amount.
Now all we need to do is save this setting so that we can apply it to other images.
Take a look at the panel on the left hand side of your image. You should see a Presets panel that looks similar to the image on the right.Click the "+" icon to the right of the word Presets. This will pop up the dialog allowing you to save your new image preset....
After clicking on the plus sign, the New Develop Preset dialog will pop up.In this dialog, enter a descriptive name for the Preset Name; here we've chosen Disable Sharpening.
Next, click the "Check None" button located near the bottom in order to uncheck all of the boxes.
Then, find the checkbox for Sharpening and mark it by clicking on it.
Finally, click the Create button to save your new preset. It should immediately show up in your list.
Applying the new Develop Preset
Now you can select any number of images and apply this preset to them in order to remove any sharpening that Lightroom may have set by default. The best part is that it will not affect any other develop options that you may have set on your images - so you can use this at any point during your workflow.
If you want to take it a step further, you can apply this preset to all photos at import time. I would only recommend this if you tend to always bring your images into Photoshop or another tool before printing; for quick jobs that you'll just tweak in Lightroom and then export to the web you'd want to make sure that you've got at least some level of sharpening in effect.
However, if you do want to apply this as early as possible, just look at the "Apply Preset" dropdown menu in the Import Dialog. You should find the Disable Sharpening preset that you created earlier - just select it and all of the images that you've imported will have their sharpening set to zero!
Other Uses
Now that you're armed with this knowledge, you can create more custom presets that you can have applied upon Lightroom Import. One good one could be default settings for Vibrance and Saturation - like your colors to pop a little more like Velvia? Just dial in some new numbers, save a preset, and apply it upon image import. You're a bit limited by the fact that Lightroom will only allow one preset to be used at import, but you can create an unlimited number of them.
Prebuilt Develop Preset for Lightroom to Disable Sharpening
Though it's a pretty straightforward process, I've gone ahead and created a Lightroom Preset that will simply Disable Sharpening as described above. Right-click and Save As to download the file and save it to the appropriate location:
Click this link to download the Disable Sharpening Preset Extension.Mac
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets/Where "~" is your user directory.Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets
5 comments:
That's a good tip. I like to do my sharpening and noise reduction in NoiseNinja, so I'll be disabling sharpening in all images.
WTF are you using Windows dialogs for? Don't you have a Mac yet?
lol - my PCs are still alive and kicking, though they seem to kick less and less every day. Maybe the next round will be a Mac switch.
Actually, no, do not turn off sharpening. You need to do pre-sharpening. Check out Bruce Frasers book "Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2". Excellent 300 page book just on sharpening with lots of data to prove two step sharpening is needed most of the time.
Anon - I've seen some of Bruce's articles on the matter and it certainly seems like a good idea. However, I think Lightroom's current implementation of "Sharpening" is a bit weak and probably shouldn't be used for this purpose.
The upcoming Lightroom 1.1 will include Enhancements to the Sharpening section as well as some other enhancements. These enhancements seem to have been built with Bruce's "Capture Sharpening" strategy in mind and will likely be well-suited for this task.
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