And He hath Made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand hath He Hid me, and Made me a polished shaft; in His quiver hath He Hid me;

Isaiah 49:2 KJV

Photo Editing nowadays takes on so many different facets of the overall workflow of photography. Even if you take the best exposed, white balanced, well composed image with good focus, there's still a bunch of things in post editing (i.e. Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, Corel PaintShop Pro, etc.) That you can (will) find you want to tinker with. One of those items we will go over today is sharpening your photos. And yes, this is helpful even if you, as mentioned above, have images with good focus. Check this out.

Above is the title image of a cliffside in downtown Sedona, Arizona. The image was already sharp, but going in closer, I found it could use a bit of tweaking to bring out more detail. The examples I will go over were done in Adobe Lightroom with their sharpening tool. (You are shooting in RAW format right? I may need to do an article on that in another one) but thankfully whether your images are saved in RAW or jpeg or what have you, any quality editing software will allow you to do this workflow, as we are going to be using our eyes for this one and not necessarily numbers and graphs. So...

I have cropped in to one of the edges of the cliffs, where I am looking for a stark contrast between two objects. One of the things that works very well for this is when you have rocks meeting the sky behind it. Depending on your picture, you can look for other areas of opposing exposure, but this s very effective. I'll show you why. Sharpening really brings out artifacts that can "crunch in" to form more "aggressive" pixels when you over sharpen your images. Think of this as a calibration guide, as your images can actually show you when your sharpening too much. Here's what I look for.

Below are three crops of the same area of the mountainside, zoomed in to a ludicrously tight area so we can see this better.

Ok so right off the bat, you see how soft this is? Yes it looked sharp zoomed out, but we need to tighten this up a bit.

Now, to illustrate how this can be overdone, I crammed the sharpening lever in Lightroom all the way to the max. Now you see, as the rock meets the sky vertically, how suddenly we have this bold line (and some noise, or visual static) appear? That wasn't there before. When this "crunches in," you know this is over sharpened. What we need to do is use this bold line as a guide, and find that sweet spot where it is sharp enough, but right before that line and that noise really start to come in.

There we go, that's much better. You can see how the line and the noise is just on the cusp of starting to show - that's our cut-off point with the sharpening tool. Don't go past that. That's where you want it!

So that's what I recommend. This is a terrific way to "eyeball" it to taste, and get your images nice and sharp without overdoing it. You see, every image is going to be different. I can't say, sharpen it to 70 or 80 or 120 with the sharpening lever, it all varies picture to picture - no two are going to be the same; there's too many variables that make every one of them unique. Again, this will work with any quality photo editing software, so you're not limited just to the Adobe Suite ecosystem.

I think this topic is such an important reminder of not over sharpening something else - our words... In the Passage from the Book of Isaiah at the top of this page, the Lord reminds us (and as a Christian I definitely take note of this) that our mouth is like a sharp sword. It is meant to be used to encourage, to educate, and also - lovingly correct where needed - but NOT meant to be used as an abusive and heavy handed tool to speak words that actually cut and hurt the emotions and heart of a person and crushing their spirit. Jesus Showed PERFECTLY how this "sharp sword" that Isaiah mentions should be used. Words with love. Words with patience. Words with respect. Words with correction, even... Just don't OVER sharpen it! Thank you for reading this; I pray that you are blessed.

Until next time...