Sharpening in PS3 and lightroom

Question

Hi,
After sharpening in PS3 with the intent of printing from Lightroom, what should the settings be regarding the sharpening in Lightroom? Still on high? How does the Lightroom sharpening affect the sharpening done in PS3, if in fact something is happening? Thanks again!

Answer 1

John,
Good question. You may already be very aware of the following, but for those who may not be, the sharpening tools in Lr are MEANT to be used as the first stage in a two or three step process, as outlined by Bruce Fraser in his book, RealWorld Camera Sharpening with Adobe CS2. Jeff Schewe, a close friend and collaborator with the late Mr. Fraser, has explained the whole thing both online in Lr tutorials and here on the forum.
Bruce taught three stage sharpening:
1) Capture, where you overcome the problems inherent in digital sensors and Bayer algorithms (this is what LR's sharpening is designed to do and does quite well);
2) Creative, where you select specific areas to do sharpening with the settings appropriate for that area, including "de"-sharpening some areas if useful (done in Photoshop or your other full-pixel-editing program of choice);
3) Output, sharpening designed to match the image to the specific output use, whether "online" or printed, and dependent if printed upon the specific size of the image to be output on the specific printing device. This last stage, also probably done with your chosen pixel editor, is done only for that specific print and you might choose not to save this as your "final" of that image.
As you can see, the problem with printing from Lr is that it is not really designed to do the output sharpening ... but still, once you understand the tools it does fairly well, for smaller prints at least. I think you'll have to test what it does to an image already sharpened in CS3, and let us know what it does.
I think, as Nicolas suggested, that if the Lr staff includes a printing module and expects us to actually use it, they might include a separate tutorial on this specific useage of the sharpening tools.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, PLEASE go online and find Jeff's tutorial on the sharpening features of Lr and how to use them.
R. Neil Haugen