There’s Lightroom ‘sharpening’, and there’s real sharpening…

Introduction

I use Adobe Lightroom for editing all my images, and it’s a very good program, so generally I have no complaints.

However, there’s one thing I never do in Lightroom, and that’s sharpening.

The problem is that ‘sharpening’ in Lightroom is not really sharpening at all. It’s adding contrast. And there’s a big difference.

Sharpening is supposed to reduce or remove blur, whether it’s caused by camera shake, the movement of the subject or poor focusing.

What Lightroom does is simply increase the contrast around the edges of each object in the frame to give the illusion of sharpness.

Up until recently, that was disappointing, obviously, but I didn’t realise there was an alternative.

Imagine my joy when I discovered Topaz Labs Sharpen AI…!

When it comes to sharpening, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

I read a few reviews and watched a couple of videos online before trying it out, and I was amazed by the transformation in some of the images. The Motion Blur mode was particularly impressive, turning the eye of a bird in one example from a blurred mess to a pin-sharp rendering.

In addition, the idea that the program could somehow ‘know’ that the focus point was either beyond or in front of the subject and correct for that was just mind-blowing!

Sharpen AI also boasts a number of other features:

• regular software updates to improve performance

• three different algorithms to choose from (Motion Blur, Out of Focus and Too Soft)

• option to choose algorithm automatically (except in Comparison View)

• masking (either manual or automatic using the Find Objects button)

• Suppress Noise slider

• Add Grain slider

• automatic settings for Remove Blur and Suppress Noise

• automatic selection of sharpening mode (except in Comparison View)

• options for Normal, Very Noisy and Very Blurry images

• zoom (presets and manual entry)

• batch processing for multiple images

• Undo and Redo buttons

• Preview window

• Original button to toggle between the sharpened and unsharpened image (in Single View)

• tool tips where there is a ‘?’ icon

• four different view options:

  • Single View

  • Split View

  • Side-by-side View

  • Comparison View

Getting started

The first thing you’ll have to do, obviously, is download the software. Topaz Labs has a suite of three main programs: Sharpen AI, DeNoise AI and Gigapixel AI.

You can buy them individually or as a set, but it’s probably worth taking advantage of the free trial first of all.

Both Sharpen AI and DeNoise AI offer sharpening and noise reduction, but, as the names suggest, they each have a different specialism. Gigapixel AI is used for increasing the file size of your images, and that’s handy if you’ve cropped in heavily and/or you don’t have enough pixels to play with.

As it happens, I’m an affiliate for Topaz Labs, so you can get 15% off any purchase by following this link and using the discount code nickdale15.

Once you’ve downloaded, installed and opened up the software, you’re ready to go.

You can either drag images directly into the main window or click the Browse button to find the image(s) you want.

Alternatively, you can right-click on any image in Lightroom, select Edit In and pick Topaz Labs Sharpen AI from the list. (The program is automatically added to this menu option when you install it.)

Workflow

Sharpen AI has a simple interface, and it’s very easy to use.

What I tend to do is use as many of the automatic settings as possible and only play around with the manual sliders if I’m really not happy with the results.

Here’s my workflow.

1. Drag the first image into the main window (or on to the icon in the Dock if the program’s not already open).

2. Click on View in the top menu bar and select Comparison View (to show the original and the three available sharpening options).

3. Click on Zoom in the top menu bar and select Zoom 100% (or simply hit Command+2 on the Mac or Control+2 on the PC).

4. Click on each of the Motion Blur, Out of Focus and Too Soft windows (or the buttons in the right menu bar) and toggle the Settings to Auto.

5. Make sure the Add Grain slider is set to zero.

6. Click on the eye of the subject in the preview window

At this point, you can simply look at the three different windows to see which option has done the best job at sharpening your image.

If you want to go to Single View to widen your work area, just double-click on one of the windows.

I take two-thirds of my wildlife images using a very long lens, so I usually find that Motion Blur works best most of the time. Out of Focus is occasionally useful, but Too Soft is only really acceptable when the other two options are over-sharpening the image, and you want to tone it down a bit.

Once you’re happy with the version in one of the windows, you can export it in any of a number of different formats:

1. Click on the relevant window or button to make sure it’s selected (as shown by the blue rectangle in the corner)

2. Click on the Save Image button (or the Apply button if you’ve opened Sharpen AI from Lightroom.

3. Choose the appropriate options:

   • Image Format (Preserve source format, JPG, JPEG, TIF, TIFF, PNG or DNG)

   • Filename

   • Save directory (Source or Custom)

4. Click Save

Options

Manual sliders and option buttons

If the image is not sharp enough or too noisy, then you have a couple of different options:

• Play with the Remove Blur and Suppress Noise sliders

• Click on the special Very Noisy or Very Blurry buttons

Sharpen AI doesn’t always produce the perfect result, so you’ll sometimes have to make manual adjustments.

On a few occasions, Sharpen AI just won’t be able to rescue the image, so all you can do then is delete it and load the next one on your list.

View modes

I find the Comparison View the quickest and most useful way of working out which method of sharpening to use, but it depends on the image.

I guess it’s also a matter of taste.

It is quite cool when using Single View to press and hold the Original button to see the difference between the sharpened and unsharpened images. In Split View, you can drag the central line across the image to divide it in two, with one section showing the original image and the other showing the sharpened version.

If you choose not to use Comparison View, you can also automate the choice of sharpening mode by setting the Image Quality toggle switch to Auto in the right-hand menu bar.

Performance

DeNoise AI and particularly Sharpen AI used to take a long, long time to save files. It’s a lot better in the latest release (v3.0.3), but you can speed things up by making a couple of changes in Preferences (Command + , on the Mac or under Topaz Sharpen AI in the main menu):

• Under Performance, choose your graphics processor rather than the CPU as the AI Processor.

• Under Allowed Memory Consumption, choose High.

These two tweaks should make a big difference, and the software is being upgraded every few months, so I expect the performance to improve in future.

Bulk editing

If you have a lot of files to get through, then you also have the option of bulk editing them.

All you need to do is check that your default settings are correct and then drag all the files into the main window from Finder or File Explorer.

This is obviously quite a convenient time-saving option, but I don’t often use it because it’s a bit too risky. I want to make sure that every single image is perfect, and I don’t trust the software to do that…yet!

I guess you could go through the resulting sharpened images one by one and check the results, but I prefer to work on one image at a time and watch TV or something while each file is being saved.

It used to take a long time, and I usually upload my images to stock agencies in batches of 100, so that didn’t really work for me.

The latest version of the software saves images a lot faster, but I’m going to stick with my existing method for now.

Grain

I never use the grain slider, but the idea is that adding grain can often give the impression that the image is less noisy. I don’t particularly like grain in my pictures, but feel free to experiment if you wish. This method can work particularly well in black and white.

Watch out!

Sharpen AI is a very good product, but it helps if you know its limitations and how you can get the best out of it.

Here are a few hints and tips:

• For best results, work on the uncropped image. Sharpen AI and DeNoise AI work best when they have the maximum number of pixels to play with. Most of the time, it doesn’t really matter, but I recommend cropping the image in Lightroom after you’ve sharpened it if you want to be extra careful.

• Be patient! Saving images in Sharpen AI takes quite a while - between 30 seconds and a minute for a 20MB file - so you’ll have to allow plenty of time in your workflow. Batch processing might speed things up a bit, but that way you lose control over the settings for each individual file.

• Don’t sharpen in Lightroom. Lightroom recently changed its default sharpening setting to 40, so make sure you reset it to zero for any image you’re going to edit in Sharpen AI, which simply does the job a lot better. You might want to set up a preset or even apply such a preset to every image on import.

• Reduce noise before sharpening in order to avoid ‘sharpening the noise’. In Lightroom, it doesn’t matter if you add noise reduction before you sharpen because the software ‘knows what it’s doing’. However, Sharpen AI and DeNoise AI are separate programs, so that doesn’t apply if you use both of them on the same image. Again, this is not a big deal most of the time, and of course both programs have sliders for noise reduction and sharpening, but it’s something to bear in mind if, for instance, you want to produce a large format print.

• If you need to change from Normal to Very Noisy or Very Blurry for all three modes in Comparison View, the quickest way to do it is to go from right to left, ie from Too Soft to Out of Focus to Motion Blur, changing the mode each time. If you go from left to right, the program ‘flips back’ to the mode it thinks is best before you’ve had a chance to change all the settings. Just a small point, but it’s good to know!

• Use masking if parts of your image are over-sharpened and the background isn’t too noisy. I find this particularly important for slow pan images because they rely on blurring both the background and parts of the subject, such as the legs of an animal. There’s a Mask button at the bottom of the main window. If you click it, you have two options.

  • Manually ‘paint over’ the parts of the image that you want the sharpening and noise reduction algorithms to work on. There are various options to change the brush, including the Radius, Softness and Opacity, and you can also make it Edge-aware (the equivalent of Auto Mask for Lightroom adjustment brushes). To save time, there are also four settings for the masking tool in the Options dropdown menu at the foot of the window:

    • Fill. This fills the entire frame with the mask so that you can just erase the bit you don’t need in Sub (ie Subtract) mode.

    • Invert. If the mask needs to occupy a large chunk of the image, you can select the bit that you don’t want and then simply click Invert to reverse the selection.

    • Clear. This clears the current mask if you want to start again.

    • Delete. This deletes any mask and returns you to the main window.

  • Click on the Find Objects button in the bottom left-hand corner and select the elements you need. As you can see from the picture below, the software has managed to detect the horse and rider, but it isn’t always so smart. When I clicked the Find Objects button while editing the elephant image at the top of this article, Sharpen AI thought it was a bird!

• Use DNG or TIFF as your default file format. Sharpen AI can’t save images in manufacturer-specific RAW formats such as .NEF for Nikon users. If you open a .NEF file and choose Preserve source format, you’ll just end up with a generic DNG RAW file.

• Make sure you check the file size after saving. Sharpen AI can easily double the file size of an image, so just make sure that’s not a problem. Most stock agencies have a limit of 20-50MB, for instance, so I simply export all my sharpened images in Lightroom using a preset that limits the file size to 19.5MB.

• Don’t over-sharpen! It’s very easy to become obsessed with removing blur and think that you’ve ‘succeeded’ if everything’s tack sharp. Just remember that your images still have to look natural - especially if you’re a wildlife photographer like me - so you might have to dial it back sometimes. Sharpness isn’t everything.

• Save the sharpened image into a different folder. If you choose the Source directory, then Sharpen AI can’t replace the existing file it’s working on, so you’ll have to rename it manually afterwards. If you go to Preferences, you can choose Default filename prefix, Default filename suffix or Append processing mode as suffix from the Save Options. Personally, I just delete everything in the text boxes and deselect the other option, but the program then adds ‘ (1)’ to the filename instead. This is not a big deal, and it’s a bit like the restrictions on exporting from Lightroom, but it pays to get your workflow right if you’re sharpening a lot of images. Alternatively, you can simply drag files on to the icon in the Dock (if you’re using a Mac), and all changes will be saved to that file without any suffix being added.

• Quit Sharpen AI before re-uploading a file you’ve just edited. If you notice something wrong with your image in Sharpen AI, close it, fix it in Lightroom and then re-export it to the same folder, Sharpen AI will display the previous version. It only switches to the new version if you quit Sharpen AI and then open it up again.

• Be careful of memory usage. Sharpen AI is very demanding of system resources. Other programs will slow down while files are being saved, and if you sharpen lots of files one after the other, you’ll probably find that your memory usage shoots through the roof! At that point, you can either shut down and reopen Sharpen AI or clean up your memory by using a program such as Dr Cleaner (on the Mac). If you use up too much memory and your Mac freezes, you can’t even force Sharpen AI to quit by pressing Command + Option + Esc, so you have to do a hard restart by pressing and holding the power button - as I’ve found out to my cost!

• Set your default preferences for saving files in Lightroom and Sharpen AI. Personally, I like to save sharpened images as TIFF files if I’m editing in Sharpen AI from Lightroom, but I prefer to stick with JPEGs if I’m just sharpening the exported files I want to upload to stock agencies. Fortunately, you can set the appropriate defaults in both programs so that you’re not constantly having to change them for each image.

Conclusion

And there you have it.

Just to recap, I think Sharpen AI is a brilliant tool to have at your disposal. I’m a big fan of sharpness in my wildlife images, and this program allows me to ‘rescue’ dozens of images that would be unusable or just plain embarrassing otherwise.

Try it out for yourself. If you like it, you can get 15% off any purchase by following this link and using the discount code nickdale15.

Good luck…!

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

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