My photos from the 2014 Santa Fe Concorso Mountain Tour, let me show you them.

Wow. Killer shots, Mike! And cool cars, too. Looks like some nice use of the unsharp mask?

When I was in Santa Fe, I stayed right by there. I recognize that square in the first bunch of photos.
 
Wow. Killer shots, Mike! And cool cars, too. Looks like some nice use of the unsharp mask?

When I was in Santa Fe, I stayed right by there. I recognize that square in the first bunch of photos.

Thanks. That's lab color sharpening. It's a really nice way of getting it done.
 
Cool. Looks great.

Thanks again. I picked up the technique a few years ago and recorded most of it as a Photoshop action (some parts of the process can't be automated), then I promptly forgot the whys & whats of what is actually going on. You're making a conversion from RGB to Lab Color and essentially unsharpening the highlights and nothing else so it really pops, but it doesn't look like someone just rolled the sharpening slider up too far. Then you convert back to RGB. After that I do some curve adjustments and maybe monkey with a luminosity mask and then call it a day.

By the way, I don't know if you remember me picking your brain earlier this year about Lightroom but I totally get it now and I won't work without it. So the whole process is some tweaking in Lightroom, then the Photoshop steps I just described.

Do you have a standard recipe? I'd be interested to hear about your process.
 
Thanks again. I picked up the technique a few years ago and recorded most of it as a Photoshop action (some parts of the process can't be automated), then I promptly forgot the whys & whats of what is actually going on. You're making a conversion from RGB to Lab Color and essentially unsharpening the highlights and nothing else so it really pops, but it doesn't look like someone just rolled the sharpening slider up too far. Then you convert back to RGB. After that I do some curve adjustments and maybe monkey with a luminosity mask and then call it a day.

By the way, I don't know if you remember me picking your brain earlier this year about Lightroom but I totally get it now and I won't work without it. So the whole process is some tweaking in Lightroom, then the Photoshop steps I just described.

Do you have a standard recipe? I'd be interested to hear about your process.

I used to play around with a lot of Photoshop actions. Mostly unsharp mask. I haven't been reading much on photography lately, so this is the first I've heard of Lab. I've been reading about it for the past few minutes, though, and it sounds like a good option.

Right now I only use Photoshop for heavy lifting (on ~0.3% of my photos) and just use the Lightroom sharpening, keeping everything at default except boosting the radius to 1.5. I tinker with the clarity a little most of the time, too.

The biggest impact on my sharpness, though, as far as I can tell, is that I never shoot my apertures wide open. Even in low, low light, I keep my aperture at least one stop smaller than wide open and just take the heat on the high ISO noise which bothers me less and less every day. And if there's good light I keep the aperture around 5.6-8, which on my lenses is mega sharp.
 
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