On output sharpening

Lightroom 2.0 includes new output sharpening facilities in the export dialog, the print module and the web output module. These are extremely useful. The functionality is to correct for softness induced by the scaling for output and for the softness of the output medium such as a screen or a printing process. Here I'll talk about the use for output images for the web, email, etc. I used the export dialog scaled to 600 points for the long dimension and selected different levels of "screen" sharpening. Here is an example of a waterfall image. See (and buy prints of ;-) )the real image here. You can switch between different output sharpening levels by hovering over the names on top.


unsharpened
low sharpening
standard sharpening
high sharpening


To me, the difference between no sharpening and even just low sharpening is night and day. In the lychen details on the wet rocks for example. You wouldn't notice probably if you just have two images in different contexts, but you would probably thin-slice prefer the slightly sharpened one. The high sharpening is still very good in my opinion and works well for this image.

Here an another example of a cliché truck. This image has lots of sharp detail and you'll see that going to high has a different effect than on the waterfall image.

unsharpened
low sharpening
standard sharpening
high sharpening


Notice the extraordinary amount of extra detail that is pulled out in the hood area by the sharpening. This time, I think high is over the top and the best is probably low or standard. This is quite generally true for images that have man-made structures that have very sharp transitions. In general I have found that using standard gives very good results for most images, but of course this all depends on your taste.