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to apply the edge masking technique referred to here. As I said earlier, because of how the sharpening controls have been updated in Camera Raw, the Detail panel slider controls now provide a much better capture sharpening workflow solution. For example, the original Photoshop edge masking technique (on which this is based) could only ever produce a fixed width mask edge. While you could vary some of the settings to refine the look of the final mask, it was still rather tricky and cumbersome to do. With Camera Raw it is now much easier to vary the mask width because we now have a single slider control that does everything.

Masking slider example

1.

When the Masking slider is at the default zero setting, no masking is applied. If you hold down the key as you drag the Masking slider, you can see a grayscale preview of the mask that is being generated. At the 50% setting shown here, the mask is just starting to protect the areas of flat tone from being sharpened.

2.

In this next screen shot you can see a preview where the Masking slider has been taken to the maximum 100% setting. In this example the masking is a lot stronger and protects all the flat tone areas, leaving only the strongest edges unmasked. The sharpening effect is now only applied to the remaining white areas.

Some real world sharpening examples

Now that I have given you a run down on what the individual sharpening sliders do, let's look at how you would use them in practice to sharpen an image.

Sharpening portrait images

Figure 4.7 shows a 1:1 close-up view of a male portrait where I used the following settings: Amount: 35, Radius: 1.2, Detail: 20, Masking 70. This combination of Sharpening slider settings is most appropriate for use with portrait photographs, where you wish to sharpen the important areas of detail such as the eyes and lips, but protect the smooth areas (like the skin) from being sharpened.

Figure 4.7 Here is an example of the sharpening settings used to pre-sharpen a portrait.

Sharpening landscape images

Figure 4.8 shows the settings that would be used to sharpen a landscape image. The settings used here were: Amount: 40, Radius: 0.8, Detail: 50, Masking: 10. This combination of Sharpening slider settings is most appropriate for subjects like the example shown here. You could include quite a wide range of subject types in this category and basically you would use this particular combination of slider settings whenever you needed to sharpen photographs that contained a lot of narrow edge detail. Camera Raw 6.0 now generates narrower halo edges whenever the Radius slider is applied in the 0.5–1.0 range. This has resulted in the ability to apply lower Radius settings to fine-detailed images that need a low radius, but without generating such noticeable halos.

Figure 4.8 Here is an example of the sharpening settings used to pre-sharpen a landscape photo.

Sharpening a fine-detailed image

Figure 4.9 shows an example of a photograph that contains a lot of fine-edge detail, where the Sharpening sliders in the Detail panel needed be taken to extremes. In order to sharpen the fine edges in this picture I had to take the Radius down to a setting of 0.6. I also wanted to emphasize the detail here and therefore ended up setting the Detail slider to +80. This is a lot higher than one would choose to use normally, but I have included this particular image in order to show an example of a photograph that required a unique treatment. As with the previous example, I only needed to apply a very small amount of masking since there were few areas in the photograph where I needed to hide the sharpening.

Figure 4.9 This shows an example of the Detail panel sharpening settings that were used to pre-sharpen a fine-detailed subject.

How to save sharpening settings as presets

You can save the sharpening settings as ACR presets and load them as required, depending on what type of photo you are editing. You could try using the settings in Figure 4.7, 4.8 or 4.9 to create sharpening presets that could in future be applied