Bruce,
I might be a bit off topic as I have not used neat image. However I find that applying sharpening in Lightroom is ok for most of the images I process - it does result in softening of the entire image. If I have an image worthy of the extra time and effort I will export from Lightroom into Photoshop, select the bird and then apply different sharpening/noise reduction to the bird and to the background, save the image as a PSD file which is visible in Lightroom. (Can't answer why I save as a psd versus tiff).
For the run of the mill images just processed in Lightroom I have saved several presets based on ISO. For ISO 500 and below I apply
Sharpening
- Amount 55
- Radius 0.8
- Detail 25 (Lightroom default)
- Masking 50
Noise Reduction
- Luminance 0
- Color 50
- Detail and Smoothness both 50 (Lightroom Defaults)
I have defined presets for ISO 800, 1000, 1250, 1600, 2000, 2500, 3200, 4000. As the ISO increases I decrease the sharpening and increase the Luminance and Color values. For example the values used for 1000, 1600, 2500, 4000 are:
Sharpening
- Amount: 55, 55, 45, 35
Noise Reduction
- Luminance: 35, 45, 55, 80
- Color: 55, 70, 85, 100
I developed these for the Canon 5D MkIII. I now have a Canon 5D MkIV and find that for a photo taken at ISO 2500, often the preset for 1250 will be the best one to use for removing the noise while reducing the amount of overall softening. The advantages of using the presets is that with a left click of the mouse you can quickly change the settings and compare the result.
All photos imported into Lightroom have the ISO 500 preset applied during import. I then select an appropriate ISO Preset for the image being processed in Lightroom.
Thanks for raising this issue Bruce as will now download Neat Image and see if it improves my workflow and time to process images which I think are worth the extra effort.
David