Lightroom Classic has built-in lens correction profiles for fixing distortion and corner shading in countless camera lenses. It also fixes chromatic aberration, or color fringing, via a separate checkbox. The one thing it doesn’t have is corner softness correction – but there is a way around that.
Corner softness is an issue with many DSLR and mirrorless lenses. It’s pretty much a fact of life with regular consumer-level lenses, and you have to pay an awful lot more for pro-grade lenses to get real edge-to-edge sharpness.
There are programs which will correct edge softness as part of their lens correction profiles. DxO PhotoLab and PureRAW will do this automatically because DxO includes corner softness correction in its profiles. Capture One does too. It doesn’t create correction profiles for every lens, often leaving out cheaper ‘kit’ zooms for example, but when there is a Capture One correction profile, it will activate a Sharpness slider which will increase progressive edge sharpening very effectively without sharpening the centre of the image.
Adobe’s lens correction profiles don’t have this and, when you use the sharpening tools, you sharpen the whole image to the same degree.
But here’s a quick and dirty workaround that’s pretty effective. Better still, it can be saved as a one-click preset for use on other images in the future, and you can even control the intensity of the effect with the preset’s Amount slider.
Here’s how it’s done.
01 So what’s the problem?
Here’s a picture I took at Kristiansand in Norway using a Fujinon XF10-24mm F4 wide-angle lens. It’s good for shots like this but suffers from poor corner sharpness. It might not be too easy to see in this screenshot, but the left side of the photo is much softer than the center.
02 Create a radial mask
Now there’s not much point using Lightroom’s regular sharpening tools because this might improve the definition at the edges of the picture, but it’s going to over-sharpen it in the center. My solution is simple but effective – I create a radial gradient mask in the center of the picture. I can use this to restrict the sharpening effect to the edges.
03 Check/invert the mask
You can display the mask overlay to check its effect using the checkbox in the Masks panel. By default, though, you’ll probably find that the radial mask is masking the center of the image not the edges. To fix this, check the Invert box at the top of the sidebar. You should see the edges of the image overlaid in red (masked) while the center is clear.
04 Make your sharpening adjustments
I’ve panned over to the other side of the image to check the blur on that side too – lenses aren’t always symmetrical in their edge blur characteristics. Now I can set about correcting the blur. It’s quite severe with this lens, so I’ve pushed the Sharpness slider right up to maximum and I’ve done the same with the Texture slider. I’ve even boosted the Clarity value to try to restore some visual crispness to these areas. Does all that look a bit strong? Don’t worry, because you can easily tune the effect to suit different images later…
05 Save a preset
This is such a useful everyday adjustment – especially with this lens – that I want to save it as a preset. Now the two key settings here are
- The Masking box, which will store not just the mask but the adjustments I made
- The Support Amount Slider, which I’ll need later to control the strength of the effect
I leave all the other boxes unchecked because I want this preset to apply an edge sharpening mask only, and not to override any other image adjustments.
06 Using the preset
Here’s another image that would benefit from the same edge sharpening, and I’ve zoomed in to 200% so that I can see the effect. All I need to do is move the mouse over the new preset to check how it looks, click the preset to apply it and then use the Amount slider above to control the strength. I deliberately made the sharpening adjustments quite strong so that I can reduce the amount as needed for images that need less sharpening.
Horizontal vs vertical images
There is one more thing to mention. If you use this same preset on a vertical format image, Lightroom will try to anticipate your intention by elongating the circular radial mask into a vertical ellipse. This is not what you want, but there doesn’t seem to be any way around this. The only solution is to create a second preset designed specifically for vertical images, but with the same circular mask shape used for the first.
