The masking slider allows me to only sharpen the areas that already have crisp edges. In this image of an elephant in Thailand, the background was blurred out and I do not want to sharpen the burry areas. This way you can selectively adjust ONLY the edges of your image.
As you move the slider to the right, it masks out everything but the edges. This slider, when pushed to the far left, is set so that the entire image will sharpened. I’m going to start out by opening my image into the Develop module, and make sure that the Detail panel is in view. My preference for sharpening my images is to start at the bottom and work my way up, so for this tutorial we’ll start with the Masking slider.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, here is a very simple step-by-step on how to sharpen your images in Adobe Lightroom. If you are going to print your photos, sharpen them! It should be the last thing you do in your post-processing workflow.Selective sharpening, or even masking your images (as I will demonstrate below), is usually the best way to go. You don’t need to sharpen the entire image.You can’t sharpen a photo that is out-of-focus. Sure, you can add sharpening in post-processing, but all you will be doing is sharpening blurred-out pixels.Every photo, even if it is tack-sharp out of camera, can benefit from sharpening.But before we begin, there are a few things to keep in mind:
And because I use Lightroom for nearly every single photograph I process, I’m going to share with you my method of sharpening in Adobe Lightroom’s Develop module. Our cameras & lenses can only do so much for us, and once a photograph is out of the camera, the process of sharpening has really just begun.