Do Capture Sharpening?

When you shoot in RAW format, you’re telling your camera to turn off any sharpening done in-camera. So, by default, Camera Raw applies a little bit of sharpening, so your images don’t look like soft bunnies. In Camera Raw, click on the Detail icon (it’s the third one from the right) beneath the histogram and, in the Detail panel, you’ll see that the Amount is set to +25. For JPEG or TIFF images, it’s set to zero because they already had sharpening applied in the camera itself, so it figures those don’t need it. Anyway, this is called “capture sharpening,” and it’s there to bring back some of the sharpness that’s lost when you take a photo in RAW format. I feel like that +25 amount is a bit too low, and if you agree, go ahead and crank that up a bit (to at least +35, if not +40), while the image is still in RAW format (before you open it in Photoshop). Capture sharpening is kind of “pre-sharpening”—so, think of it that way—and everything needs a little pre-sharpening, whether you do it in Camera Raw to a RAW image, or in-camera to a JPEG or TIFF.