Sharpening photos using LR5

That'll happen with every sharpening system you use if you overdo it. Try a wee bit of masking and luminance after sharpening. This'll reduce some of the noise.
 
Dael_Pix said:
Why do photos become grainy when using the sharpening tool in Lightroom 5?
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Because sharpening looks for "edges" and increases the contrast of those edges by darkening, or lightening them to give "perceived" sharpness. It is actually impossible to make an image sharper in terms of increasing resolution or adding detail. It's all smoke and mirrors I'm afraid.

My advice is, don't do it unless you need to, but when you do, don't add more than say +40 in LR, and use very low radius and detail settings. Loads of sharpness, with high radius, and especially high detail settings will make things worse.

Also.. get used to using the "masking" slider to remove artefacts from edge free parts of the image.


In short though... just stop over sharpening.
 
Different photos will require different amounts of sharpening, so it's impossible, to give a one hit solution.

As Brash says, use the masking tool, to be selective about what you are sharpening. In case you don't know, press the Alt key while moving the masking slider. Anything turning black is not sharpened. Useful to ensure you don't sharpen skin, etc.
 
I've always felt that Photoshop CS3 does a better job at it.

I've come to realise that I've made a mistake in thinking that I'm viewing a photo at 100% in LR5 when I have it set to 3:1 and NOT 1:1.

:oops: :$
 
If you hold alt and move the mask and radius sliders, you can see where the sharpening takes effect .. or not, in the case of reducing it. I rarely go above 30 if I even touch it at all.
 
I've pretty much stopped using LR to sharpen, and use the dynamic contrast filter in Perfect effects, if anything at all.
 
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