sharpening

A couple days back Tronam made a perceptive comment on my JPEG export saturation loss post, noting that he’d noticed saturation loss being caused by sharpening, but wasn’t quite sure why that was happening. I immediately smacked my forehead, because I’d known about the ways sharpening could sap saturation, but hadn’t thought about it when writing that previous article. So, today, we’ll dive into it.

There are three key points. First, sharpening can (but won’t always) have an effect on saturation. Second, that loss isn’t always avoidable. Finally, if you’re working with images in Lightroom, it’s possible (although unlikely) that you won’t notice that saturation loss until you actually export the image. (more…)