And He hath Made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand hath He Hid me, and Made me a polished shaft; in His quiver hath He Hid me;

Isaiah 49:2 KJV

Photo Editing nowadays takes on so many different facets of the overall workflow of photography. Even if you take the best exposed, white balanced, well composed image with good focus, there's still a bunch of things in post editing (i.e. Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, Corel PaintShop Pro, etc.) That you can (will) find you want to tinker with. One of those items we will go over today is sharpening your photos. And yes, this is helpful even if you, as mentioned above, have images with good focus. Check this out.

Above is the title image of a cliffside in downtown Sedona, Arizona. The image was already sharp, but going in closer, I found it could use a bit of tweaking to bring out more detail. The examples I will go over were done in Adobe Lightroom with their sharpening tool. (You are shooting in RAW format right? I may need to do an article on that in another one) but thankfully whether your images are saved in RAW or jpeg or what have you, any quality editing software will allow you to do this workflow, as we are going to be using our eyes for this one and not necessarily numbers and graphs. So...

I have cropped in to one of the edges of the cliffs, where I am looking for a stark contrast between two objects. One of the things that works very well for this is when you have rocks meeting the sky behind it. Depending on your picture, you can look for other areas of opposing exposure, but this s very effective. I'll show you why. Sharpening really brings out artifacts that can "crunch in" to form more "aggressive" pixels when you over sharpen your images. Think of this as a calibration guide, as your images can actually show you when your sharpening too much. Here's what I look for.

Below are three crops of the same area of the mountainside, zoomed in to a ludicrously tight area so we can see this better.