Subtitles of the Movie

Now, I realize this is a tutorial on Lightroom, but if we're going to talk about sharpening sports images that have been captured in indoor arenas or at night in lighted football arenas, then we have to talk about doing it right and doing it right means not doing it in Lightroom because one of the things Lightroom does not do very well and that is sharpening. Always do your sharpening in Photoshop. So let's take a look at how we're going to approach this and identify our problems. Parts of this image are well exposed; thank goodness the important parts, the hair, the face. Obviously those are the center points of the image. Tops of the arms, no noise, you know, this is all looking real good. But if we look at the dark areas of the arm here, especially right around the neck, this is the major issue right here. You can see the noise in there, okay? Now, here's how you would normally approach the sharpening chore. Go to the Unsharp Mask and I've got 100 at 0.5 at 0 threshold. Now, that's going to look great for the image itself, but look what it does to the noise. It really brings out the noise. OK, what you want to do is set your sharpening settings to not bring out the noise and the only way to do that is to increase the threshold. Now, you'll still get a good sharpen on the aspects of the image that you want to sharp, but you will keep to a minimum the sharpening on the noise. See how that works? You can't even hardly see it. Now, if you look at the cheerleader's face and her hair, you can see the difference, but if you look at the neck, where that noise resides, you can see that there's it's just very, very little accentuation of that noise, so that's something we can live with. Now, obviously you can do more post on this and put a softening or a Gaussian blur in the neck or those noise areas to bring that down some, but that's extra work. If you want to do it, be my guest, but in terms of quick and dirty sharpening, always do it in Photoshop, always increase your threshold to about 2, and on this image, that's worth taking a look at. OK, let's save that sharpening adjustment. Let's look at our image size. We see that this is a 72 dpi, very large physical image, and our resolution is 975 x 650, so those are the parameters in which the settings in the unsharp mask work best. Always increase that threshold to 2 and you'll have the best possible sharpening result that you can imagine.