To sharpen the sky, or not?

[photogeoff]

Hi, I have read two articles lately about sharping sky, there both said that you do not  sharpen because of artifacts. I use Lightroom @ I use the preset sharpen-scenic. 

It sets Amount to 40, Radius to 0.8, Default to 35, Masking to O. 

Do you  sharpen the sky or not?  If yes what setting do you set?  Geoff

[Guest]

There are threads about this already in the archives.

 

Personally I use (or rather have left) the default sharpen in LR 25/1/25/0 as a capture sharpen, same in ACR in CC. Never had a problem with that here or at any other agency.

 

I also do output sharpening for one commercial client and the default doesn't produce any issues with normal output sharpening.

[Allan Bell]

Personally I have never sharpened a sky. In fact if the sky looks noisy (grainy) I tend to soften it.

 

Allan

[Steve Tucker]

Yes, there was a thread about sharpening a while back where Alamy stated that the lightroom defaults were acceptable. I always use LR default sharpening on Alamy submissions and that includes the sky. I don't do any additional sharpening though.

[Bill Brooks]

Never sharpen anything unless it contains detail. A sky with clouds is always low detail so it works against you to sharpen the sky. You might sharpen noise in the sky. Naturally soft clouds look weird if they are sharp.

 

On a Mac hold down the option key while moving the mask slider. Your image will turn into the mask. White areas on the mask will be sharpened. Black areas will not. Move the slider until the sky is all black but detail elsewhere is white.

A mask setting around 45 usually works.

 

Moving the mask slider back and forth is also a help in finding artifacts like sensor dust.

[Paul Mayall]

Why sharpen the sky?  as said above it can create artifacts, i personally add a little sharpening to the whole image in LR, approx 10 much less than 25 as many do,  i find 25 tends to make the image a little grainy or noisy, if necessary i make extra sharpening in PS however 10 in LR mostly dose the trick.

 

Paul.

[Ed Rooney]

Personally I have never sharpened a sky. In fact if the sky looks noisy (grainy) I tend to soften it.

 

Allan

 

+1

 

But normally I do nothing unless I see a problem. Frankly, I don't understand why we would want to sharpen a sky. Darken or lighten, maybe.

[Robert Brook]

If you look at Photogeoff's images you will see that there are quite a few reasons why he might want a sharp the sky:

 

      

 

In all these and similar cases do selective sharpening.  Kites and moons are easy enough. With clouds you could try using Color Range: if only sky and clouds are in the frame, selecting the sky might be easiest and then inverting and expanding the inverted selection.  Copy and paste to create a new layer.  Experiment with sharpening tools and adjust tranaparency if it helps. Merge.

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Added later:  If you only use LR I would avoid excessive sharpening of the entire image.  The default settings Geoff mentiones are fine, and you might be able to go up a bit, but you ought to be able to go much further with selective sharpening in PS without getting sharpening artifacts.  I have sometimes sharpened small components of an image that would cause instant QC death if applied to the whole.