As I mentioned in the Overview post, creative sharpening is sharpening applied to selective areas of an image for creative or artistic purposes. During this step we will be concentrating on individual aspects of the image. Creative sharpening can be applied any time during the workflow between Capture Sharpening and Output Sharpening. In Lightroom 2 the Adjustment Brush tool can be used to add some creative sharpening.
The image on the left is the finished image–after Capture, Creative and Output Sharpening. Below I show how I added a little extra punch to the subject’s eyes so that they “grab” the viewer.
The screen capture below shows a portion of this image at 1:1 with the Adjustment Brush’s Overlay Mask turned on. showing areas being affect are highlighted in red. (Use “O” for Overlay to toggle the mask visibility on and off and use Shift+”‘O” to toggle through choices the overlay’s color.)
After the Adjustment Brush tool is selected (red eclipse in screen capture below) a list of effect becomes available. Two of these affects can be used for Creative Sharpening: Sharpness and Clarity. Sharpness does what you think it does, increases contrast along edges. But with the Adjustment Brush tool we effectively only have control of the Amount slider.
Clarity affects the midtone contrast in an image. (A similar effect can be created with Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask using a high Radius and a small Amount.) When applying Creative Sharpening most images will benefit from adding some Clearity, in addition to Sharpness. In this image adding some Clearity, in addition to Sharpness, brightened the whites in the eyes and darkened irises. I think of it as Sharpness increasing apparent contrast along edges and as Clarity increasing the contrast in small areas that already have moderate amounts of contrast.
Even though I didn’t use it here, both Sharpness and Clearity can be set to negative values. These setting can be used to decease sharpness in areas of the image. And by adding some extra localized sharpening to important areas and some deceased sharping to surrounding areas, the viewer’s eye will be attached even more to the sharpened area.
While the controls for the effects for the Adjustment Brush are limited they are still effective in adding that little extra to important areas of images. If you really want to get creative with sharpening you can bring the image out to Photoshop when you have a much greater array of tools at your disposal.