Sharpening is a part of the digital workflow that stumps many photographers. It can be easy to apply, but difficult to perfect the application of sharpening. Luckily, Lightroom has a really powerful and easy to use sharpening panel. Let’s take it on today!

First, we have to clear up what sharpening is and isn’t:

• What sharpening is: an important tool that enhances detail in our phtoos
• What sharpening isn’t: a magic tool that saves blurry, out of focus photos

Too many photographers will just crank the sharpening all the way up on a blurry photo, and wind up with a horrible finished product. Don’t do it!

The sharpening are found in Lightroom’s Develop module, in the Detail Panel, which you’ll find on the right side about halfway down:

image

Let’s take a second and talk about what the sliders of the Detail panel do for us:

• Amount – This is pretty simple; sliding it to the right increases the amount of sharpening that gets applied to our image
• Radius – This
• Detail  – asdfsd
• Masking – asdfhafwe

Let’s dive a little deeper to check out the effects of these sliders:

Amount

When we adjust sharpness, adjusting the amount is always my starting point. The amount scale runs from 0 to 150. It varies from photo to photo, but I’ll typically drag it up to a midlevel number like 50-60 on the slider.

(illustration)

One thing that you’ll notice about the amount slider is that the far right side of the slider is red for a small portion. This is a warning area that cautions you against cranking your sharpening so high. More sharpening causes our images to go ugly and funky, and those high numbers should be used with caution.

Radius

The radius slider describes how “far” we want to sharpen from the edge of a pixel, from 0.5 to 3.0 pixels. This means that the sharpening of the pixel will extend

Typically, I leave this set to the default 1.0 pixel setting, Increasing it will increase our sharpening effects.

Detail

Masking

General Advice

Generally, when I do sharpening, I keep it simple: I’ll increase the amount slider for most of my images to around 25-30 on the amount slider and then leave the rest untouched. Easy enough, right? Images that could stand to have their detail emphasized more might receive a little more adjustment on the other sliders.

Try and work at 100% when working with sharpening. This means using the navigator to zoom in and work on the It’s hard to measure the impact of sharpening when you are zoomed all the way out, and it’s easy to apply too much.

When you use sharpening, the biggest point of advice that I want to offer up is to tread lightly. Many beginners, myself included long ago, have the habit of cranking the sharpening all the way up and creating some nasty looking images. Apply it sparingly and it can bring out the detail of our subject, but it can also be way overdone rather quickly.

With that said, I encourage you to experiment with sharpening to enhance the fine details of your photo!

Do you ever face a tough decision about which image to keep? Sometimes it’s hard to pick that “best” image out of a few.  Lightroom offers a feature that allows us to place two images side-by-side and determine which one we prefer. This is called compare view, and it’s a great way to two-up images and make the choice easier.

Compare view takes place in the Library module. To enter Compare view, press the the letter C on your keyboard, or press the compare view button just below the image workspace.

You can press “C” on your keyboard to enter compare view, or press the button just below the image workspace.

After you start up compare view, you may be wondering how to change the two images that are shown in the comparison grid. Lightroom lets us pick any two images to compare, even if they are completely unalike. Entering compare view chooses the image was already selected, plus the image that is directly after it.

Lightroom’s Compare view always shows two images, which it calls Select and Candidate. The select image is on the left and the candidate image is on the right.

The “select” image is shown on the left while the “candidate” image is shown on the right. Think of the select image as your current favorite, while the candidate is a candidate to replace it. You choose the select image by clicking on it on the filmstrip, and the keyboard arrows choose other “candidates.”

I always think of the Select image as my favorite, and the Candidate as the image that could possibly replace it.

Clicking on any image on the filmstrip chooses it as the Select image. You can change the Candidate image by using the keyboard arrows, left and right.

In this case, I’m picking my favorite image of the wedding venue. I clicked the first in the series to choose it as my select, and then used the keyboard arrows to continue scrolling through the other selections. Putting them side by side turns this into an easy visual decision.

After you find one that you like better, press the button in the screenshot below to name a new “Select” image.

Clicking the button illustrated above names a new “select” image for the left side of the image workspace.

You can repeat this process as many times as you wish, cycling through selections and candidates until you come to a decision.

One more tip: when you’re showing two images side by side, you probably want to see the two images as large as possible. To increase the size of the previews, hiding the panel on the left is a great way to do so. Press the arrow to the far left of Lightroom to hide the left side menu. You can always click the arrow to bring that panel back.

Before hiding the panel, the images may be a bit too small to truly judge your favorite.

After hiding the left panel, the view of the images is much greater as they take up the entire area.

Compare view is a nice tool for selecting the best image out of a set. When you’re looking to make those tough decisions between two great images, consider using compare view to do so.

Let’s recap:

• Compare view is super handy for choosing between two images
• The “select” image stays on the left, and candidates are shown on the right side of the workspace
• Clicking on an image puts it on the left side (select), while using the keyboard arrow buttons puts images in candidate view

Are you using compare view to select your best image? Leave a comment if you are using compare view or plan to start.

The Library module holds the power to explore and manage our massive image libraries. Today we’re taking a look at how to browse our images with all the power that the module has to offer. I want to go spend today going over five essential parts and methods to navigating images in the Library module.

This walkthrough assumes of course that you already have some images loaded into the catalog. If that’s not the case, you’ll want to check out this article.

1) The Filmstrip

The filmstrip is the horizontal rows of images at the bottom of Lightroom. Clicking any image

2) The Folder Explorer

Lightroom allows us to browse images and filter them down by folder, just as our computers do as we explore the folders.

The folder browser lets us explore images in the folders just as our computer’s file explorer does.

3) The Catalog Panel

A part of Lightroom’s Library module that is important but doesn’t quite warrant its own post is the Catalog panel. This view allows us to switch between three different image selections: all images in the catalog, images in our current quick collection (which we’ll talk about soon), and the images we added with our last import.

4) The Views

Lightroom has four ways of navigating your images that we talked about recently. These views are grid, loupe, compare, and survey. Check out this post to learn more about these four views and how we can use them.

Grid view is one of the many ways of exploring our images in Lightroom’s Library module. The four views let us browse the images differently.

5) Filtering

Collections are yet another way that we can section off certain types of images. Creating a collection is a grouping of images that are lumped together.

To get started with building collections, make sure that you are working in the Library module. On the left side of the Library module, press the plus button on the panel titled “Collections” to create a new collection, and choose “Create New Collection.”

Press the plus button to the right of “Collections” to start a new image collection in Lightroom. Choose “Create a New Collection.”

After pressing the button, you’ll see another list of options that pop up. Go ahead and give your collection a name. I’m going to work on putting together venue images from this wedding, so I’ll call it “Venue Photos.”

Go ahead and give your collection a name – I chose Venue Photos in this case. I usually leave all of the other options at default.

Okay, so now we’ve got a collection! You’ll see that because we left the “Include selected photos” box checked, that two images are already in the collection.

Your collection will pop up on the left side in the Collections pane. You can press the minus button to delete that collection.

To add images to the collection, we can simply drag and drop images into that collection.

Do I use collections? Sometimes. I will use them typically when I’m delivering images for a special purpose. I might put together a collection for “Angie’s Corner Florist” or a collection for a particular family member. For me, this use of collections really boosts my workflow and lets those images live in a sandbox separate from all the rest.

On a side note, I want to also say that you may get a little overwhelmed with how to approach a task in Lightroom. If you want to tag your venue photos, you could do it in a ton of ways:

• With tags, adding “venue” to each venue image
• With color labels that signify criteria, like blue labels for venue images
• Using a collection to group venue images in one, easy to find collection

What’s the best way? The good and bad news is that there’s no right way to do things. Design a system that fits what you want to do. I spent so much time searching for the “right” way to do things that I was crippled by planning.

How about you? Are you using collections or will you now that you know about them? Feel free to leave a comment to let me know how you feel.

If one of something is good, two of something is twice as good right? Well, that’s the mindset of many people with dual monitors. Many people – especially those of us that work with photos or design all day – will use two monitors to give them more screen real estate to work with.

When it comes to Lightroom, Adobe has built in some really nice ways to make use of the

From my own personal experience, I would definitely recommend a second monitor if you can afford it. I produce the majority of my work from the comfort of just my MacBook Pro’s 15 inch screen, but there are definitely times when I stop in at my desk (on the rare occasion that I’m home) and work with two monitors. I love the flexibility of throwing a window onto another screen.