Sharpen in Camera Raw?

If you want to do all your sharpening in Camera Raw (you don’t plan on doing anything in Photoshop—you’re going to process your image in Camera Raw, and save it right from there as a JPEG, using the Save Image button in the bottom-left corner), then here’s how to do it: First, click on the Detail icon (it’s the third icon from the left) beneath the histogram, and you’ll see the Sharpening settings at the top of the panel on the right. (Note: So you don’t oversharpen by accident, I recommend zooming in to at least 50%, if not 100%, so you can actually see what the sharpening is doing.) The Amount slider (obviously) controls the amount of sharpening. The Radius slider determines how many pixels out from the edge the sharpening will affect, and personally, I leave this set at 1. If I need some heavier sharpening, I’ll bump it up to 1.2 or 1.3, but that’s rare. The Detail slider acts as a halo prevention control, so it lets you apply more sharpening without seeing halos around the edges of objects. I leave it at its default setting of 25 pretty much all the time. The Masking slider lets you control where the sharpening is applied. It’s perfect for portraits of women or children, where you want the detail areas to be sharpened, but you don’t want to sharpen their skin (I cover this in Chapter 3, so check back there for more on this slider).