A couple weeks back, we answered Part I of a question we got from a fellow photographer on our Formspring page:

“My question has to do with post processing. I was wondered what sharpening method you use, and your secret to getting nice glowy clear skin for your brides :)”

Last time, we tackled skin tones so now its time to address sharpening!  When we were first starting out, we use to get so frustrated that we couldn’t seem to get our images to look as sharp as the other photographers we admired.  We kept thinking that our equipment wasn’t good enough or that we just weren’t holding the camera steady enough when shooting to get our photos to look that sharp and cripsy.  Over time we discovered a few tricks of the trade that made a big difference in our images.

ONE: Shoot with back button focus

We won’t spend much time on this hear, because you can actually read all about this method in this post we did a while back.  To sum it up though, using the back button to set the focus and the shutter button to release the shutter trains you to think of each action as a separate step since they are no longer controlled by the same button: 1) focus & 2) shoot.  There are a ton of benefits to making this switch and one of the major ones is that it creates sharper images (once you get the hang of it.)

TWO: Add +15 to the clarity slider in Lightroom

We have a custom Lightroom preset that we apply to EVERY single image and all it does is add +15 on the clarity slider.  This slider is located at the bottom of the “Basic” edits in the Develop module.  The change is pretty subtle, but it does make a difference.  If you look at the before and after images below you’ll notice more definition in the details after the clarity has been increased – it’s especially noticeable around the eyes, face and hair in this particular image.

THREE: Sharpen AFTER you resize the image for how it will be displayed.

This one is ever so important.  Adding sharpening should always be the very LAST thing you do to an image.  If you plan to put the image on your blog, resize it to the pixel dimensions that you need FIRST and THEN sharpen it.  By doing this, you make the sharpening as effective as possible based on the pixels you have.  If you sharpen and then resize, you won’t see as much of an impact.  And here’s the biggest secret of all . . . we don’t use anything fancy to sharpen our photos.  It’s just the built in Photoshop Smart Sharpen filter.  If you have Photoshop, then you’ve already got it!

For full size images (for burning disks, printing or uploading to our proofing site), we have set up a custom Photoshop action that adds 100% Smart Sharpen to every image.  The beauty of creating this process to run as an action is that you can have your files ready to go (edited, resized, etc.) and then just batch the files using Photoshop to add Smart Sharp as the last step – Photoshop does the work and then you can go watch an episode of Glee :-)

As you can tell, we use actions (and presets) a lot.  Anything that you have to do to your photos repeatedly, SHOULD be an action.  It will help you use your time as effectively as possible.  You’re probably thinking, “This sounds pretty quick and easy. Do I really need an action for this?”  In our world, we regularly processing weddings with 800 images.  That means opening each image in photoshop, applying Smart Sharp, then saving and closing it.  It takes about 10 seconds per image.  That’s 8,000 seconds total which is equal to 133 minutes OR 2 hours and 13 minutes.  Who wouldn’t want to have an extra 2 hours and 13 minutes to do something other than sit in from of their computer?

Sorry for the detour – what can we say?  We’re passionate about actions. LOL! Back to the sharpening . . . when we get images ready for our blog, we add the border & our logo, resize the image and THEN run the Smart Sharpen filer at 75%.  And of course, all four steps are done with a single action.  Take a look at the difference.  The first image was NOT resized prior to sharpening and the second one was resized and THEN sharpened.  Much crispier!

As with so many things in the photo world, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.  (What a weird and gross expression, right?)  If you use another method that works for you, great! This is just what happens to work for us.

We’d love to hear from you guys so feel free to add any additional questions or comments in the comments section below or you can ask us stuff on our Formspring page by clicking here.

Hope this little tutorial has been helpful to you.  Have a great week everybody!