Detail

Lightroom's Detail tab is split into two seemingly unrelated categories – Sharpening and Noise Reduction.

Figure 6.63 – The Detail tab and its default Sharpening and Noise Reduction settings

Sharpening

As you probably know, it is us – the photographers – who are responsible for making sharp photographs. However, because raw, digital images can never match the sharpness of analog photos, tools such as Sharpening in Lightroom can help us add a bit more definition. Before we talk about the tool in detail, let's briefly explain how Sharpening works. Like any definition-enhancing tool in Lightroom, Sharpening is also all about tweaking contrast; it just does so in a different way. Sharpening is not a magic wand that can retrieve details or recover a photograph; all it does is look for edges in the photo that are defined by varying contrast and increases the contrast alongside them, making dark areas darker and bright...