Sharpening is one of those steps that separates a finished image from a raw file sitting on your hard drive. Get it wrong and your subject looks either mushy or artificially crunchy; get it right and the feathers, fur, or eyes in your frame look exactly as detailed as they should.
Coming to you from Terry Vander Heiden, this practical video walks through sharpening a wildlife image two ways: inside Lightroom Classic and inside Photoshop, so you can see exactly what each approach gets you. Vander Heiden starts in Lightroom's Detail panel, pushing the sharpening slider into the mid-90s, then holding Option (or Alt on PC) while adjusting the Radius and Detail sliders to get a precise read on what's actually being sharpened. From there, he uses Lightroom's object selection tool inside the Masking panel to isolate the bird and push a bit more sharpening into the subject specifically, rather than applying it globally across the frame.
The Photoshop side of the workflow is where things get more involved. Vander Heiden creates a dedicated sharpening layer first, then runs it through Topaz Sharpen AI. One thing worth seeing in action: after applying Topaz, he shows exactly what happens when you sharpen without a mask. Background elements that are supposed to be soft get sharpened right along with the subject, and it's immediately noticeable around the leaves behind the bird. His fix is to use Photoshop's Select Subject tool to isolate the bird, fill the layer mask with black, then invert it so the sharpening only lives on the subject.
There's an extra step after the mask that a lot of people skip. Because any selection has an edge, the transition between the sharpened bird and the unsharpened background can show a faint halo or fuzzy fringe. Vander Heiden creates a merged composite layer on top, loads the mask selection back, inverts it so he's working only outside the bird, hides the selection so it doesn't interfere visually, and uses the Clone Stamp tool to clean up that transition zone. He works along the edge gradually, resampling a new source point as the background tone shifts, especially through lighter areas near the wing. It's methodical and takes a few minutes, but the result is a sharpened bird that blends naturally into a still-soft background. The before-and-after comparison at the end, with both the Lightroom and Photoshop versions side by side, makes the difference hard to argue with. The feather detail, the stick the bird is perched on, the area around the eye: the Topaz-sharpened version holds up noticeably better at close inspection.
The core takeaway Vander Heiden lands on is straightforward: if you're moving fast, Lightroom sharpening is good enough. If you're printing or sharing a single image, take it into Photoshop, sharpen on a separate layer, and use a layer mask to keep that sharpening on your subject only. Check out the video above for the full walkthrough from Vander Heiden, including the complete Photoshop masking and cleanup process.
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