LR5 with NX3000 - Sharpening Tutorial

[Auster Pilot]

As Phase One (who produce Capture Pro) and virtually every other RAW processing vendor seem to be very reluctant to provide out of camera RAW processing for the NX3000 I've been spending a bit of time with LR5 that came with my camera.

I'd got my head round most of the tools but the one that was eluding me in terms of getting results as good as Capture One, was sharpening. I'd heard quite a lot over the years of people saying sharpening was not very well optimised in LR and my first goes with LR seemed to indicate this may be the case.

However, today I came across this video today on the Adobe.TV site and I found it extremely useful for improving my sharpening techniques from NX3000 RAW pics.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-lightroom-5/sharpening-an-image/

While I can convert .SRW files as .DNGs that Capture One processes, Capture One doesn't provide the full functionality against .DNG files. Capture One pro is also quite expensive (around 300 Euros) so it is quite annoying that they are not providing full support for either my NX1100 or NX3000. I may go back to Capture One should they start to support these files properly, but I'm not going to pay for the upgrade to V8 that they are asking for until they do. In the meantime, if I spend more time with LR5 I may get to like it too much to go back. I just dislike being confined to a single product, but I dislike spending money when I don't need to.

Anyway here are 4 versions of one image - 3 from the .SRW file and one from the saved .JPEG image produced at the same time.




From Capture One via DNG conversion






From Lightroom 5 with new sharpening settings (note artifact features/noise is considerably improved in out of focus areas)






Original Sharpening from LR5 (otherwise same settings as other LR image)






JPEG output straight out of camera.

I'm not going to claim LR is better or worse than Capture One, but that I am now more than happy that I can achieve equivalent sharpening results since understanding it much better after watching the video.



--
Neil....
The Sky is a Beautiful Place

 

[PDM]

As Phase One (who produce Capture Pro) and virtually every other RAW processing vendor seem to be very reluctant to provide out of camera RAW processing for the NX3000 I've been spending a bit of time with LR5 that came with my camera.

I'd got my head round most of the tools but the one that was eluding me in terms of getting results as good as Capture One, was sharpening. I'd heard quite a lot over the years of people saying sharpening was not very well optimised in LR and my first goes with LR seemed to indicate this may be the case.

However, today I came across this video today on the Adobe.TV site and I found it extremely useful for improving my sharpening techniques from NX3000 RAW pics.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-lightroom-5/sharpening-an-image/

While I can convert .SRW files as .DNGs that Capture One processes, Capture One doesn't provide the full functionality against .DNG files. Capture One pro is also quite expensive (around 300 Euros) so it is quite annoying that they are not providing full support for either my NX1100 or NX3000. I may go back to Capture One should they start to support these files properly, but I'm not going to pay for the upgrade to V8 that they are asking for until they do. In the meantime, if I spend more time with LR5 I may get to like it too much to go back. I just dislike being confined to a single product, but I dislike spending money when I don't need to.

Anyway here are 4 versions of one image - 3 from the .SRW file and one from the saved .JPEG image produced at the same time.


From Capture One via DNG conversion


From Lightroom 5 with new sharpening settings (note artifact features/noise is considerably improved in out of focus areas)


Original Sharpening from LR5 (otherwise same settings as other LR image)


JPEG output straight out of camera.

I'm not going to claim LR is better or worse than Capture One, but that I am now more than happy that I can achieve equivalent sharpening results since understanding it much better after watching the video.

--
Neil....
The Sky is a Beautiful Place

Thanks for the link. Nice tutorial. Looking at your pictures I can't see any difference between 2 and 3?

 

[Auster Pilot]

Thanks for the link. Nice tutorial. Looking at your pictures I can't see any difference between 2 and 3?

Not a huge difference, but it is photo 2 in which I can see artifacts being introduced into the out of focus areas behind the focal point which do not show up in photo 3. It's always a bit of a balancing act to push sharpening without introducing too much disruption through noise or artifacts in unwanted areas. Capture One did this fairly well by default, but LR5 seems to need a bit more assistance, but it is still achievable, and I didn't discover this until the video. I particularly like the Masking feature in LR5 which restricts the sharpening to areas you want and can to some extent be used instead of Noise reduction which applies to the whole image. Furthermore the ability to switch to greyscale view (pressing the Alt button while making changesd to sharpening or noise) makes the process considerably easier to understand.

 

[Usee]

As Phase One (who produce Capture Pro) and virtually every other RAW processing vendor seem to be very reluctant to provide out of camera RAW processing for the NX3000 I've been spending a bit of time with LR5 that came with my camera.

I'd got my head round most of the tools but the one that was eluding me in terms of getting results as good as Capture One, was sharpening. I'd heard quite a lot over the years of people saying sharpening was not very well optimised in LR and my first goes with LR seemed to indicate this may be the case.

However, today I came across this video today on the Adobe.TV site and I found it extremely useful for improving my sharpening techniques from NX3000 RAW pics.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-lightroom-5/sharpening-an-image/

While I can convert .SRW files as .DNGs that Capture One processes, Capture One doesn't provide the full functionality against .DNG files. Capture One pro is also quite expensive (around 300 Euros) so it is quite annoying that they are not providing full support for either my NX1100 or NX3000. I may go back to Capture One should they start to support these files properly, but I'm not going to pay for the upgrade to V8 that they are asking for until they do. In the meantime, if I spend more time with LR5 I may get to like it too much to go back. I just dislike being confined to a single product, but I dislike spending money when I don't need to.

Anyway here are 4 versions of one image - 3 from the .SRW file and one from the saved .JPEG image produced at the same time.


From Capture One via DNG conversion


From Lightroom 5 with new sharpening settings (note artifact features/noise is considerably improved in out of focus areas)


Original Sharpening from LR5 (otherwise same settings as other LR image)


JPEG output straight out of camera.

I'm not going to claim LR is better or worse than Capture One, but that I am now more than happy that I can achieve equivalent sharpening results since understanding it much better after watching the video.

--
Neil....
The Sky is a Beautiful Place

Thank you for the comparison.

-

To my taste... ;-)

The Capture One (DNG based) output looks too artificial.

The LR 5 version with new settings comes close to the OOC JPG

The LR 5 "original sharpening" has the typical LR pattern, which can be really distracting - especially, if the real details are known...

The OOC JPG is the best compromise IMHO and could be used for further sharpening (contrast enhancements) within RAWTherapee, Silkypix or smth.

-

I hope that RAWTherapee, DxO and Silkypix will support the NX1 soon.

--
Envy is the highest form of recognition.
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Stop to run, start to think.
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Think twice - that doubles the fun!
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Your world is as big, as Your mind.
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Avoid to have only one point of view!
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U see?