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I noticed that Lightroom applies filters such as sharpness and grain in pixel sizes, by which I mean that 1/10 cropped photo will have 10x bigger grain than an uncropped photo would have. Same goes for sharpening.

I like export the finished set in constant resolution, so cropped photos will be upscaled to the same dimensions as non-cropped ones. I've been wondering if there is a way to make LR to apply resolution dependant filters after the resize is done, so they finished set would look more consistent?

I'm pretty sure this is how LR works and there's no way to change that, but this will keep bugging me until someone else confirms it.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Export the photos at the size you want in as high a quality as possible, then import them into the library and apply the grain and sharpness settings before exporting them again. Not perfect, but it'll work. \$\endgroup\$
    – ElendilTheTall
    Jan 31, 2014 at 14:53
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    \$\begingroup\$ Wny not create a virtual copy of your images, crop them in LR, then apply grain/sharpening to the crops, and simply export the crops directly (rather than cropping after the fact)? \$\endgroup\$
    – jrista
    Feb 2, 2014 at 20:51

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When exporting, you can specify Output Sharpening, which is not a fine-grained control, but does provide the opportunity to sharpen on output.

During the export process, Lightroom also has a Post Processing option where you can specify a program to send the exported image to. A common option is to specify Photoshop, where you can do things like output sharpening and add grain.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I would've loved to be able to do this from the regular sliders but seems like this(or Photoshop) is the only solution. Luckily there aren't that many extremely cropped photos in my collection. \$\endgroup\$
    – Pichan
    Feb 3, 2014 at 15:20
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Lightroom is a non-destructive image editor, which means that all changes you make to an image are actually only made when the image is exported. The changing image you see when you slide the adjustment sliders is merely a preview of what the exported image would look like.

Based on this, it is common sense that during export any adjustments/parameters are set before potentially destructive operations such as crop/resize are done. I do not recall any way to get access to the order in which the adjustments will be applied, and I strongly believe they are prebuilt to follow a specific order to minimize "damage" to the working image as the filters are successively applied.

The solution provided by ElendilTheTall seems to be the only way to do this. Additionaly, I recommend exporting as DNG (Adobe's RAW format) if you are working with RAW images (you are, aren't you?) right at the start so that you start off with your image at your desired resolution.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I snickered at "non-destructive". I know perfectly well what it means but I lost a few DNGs when LR failed to write new XMP data to the files on a network drive. As a programmer I can say there is no danger in applying effects post-resize. While the feature would be handy, I realise it would be a detour from the current workflow and it would take extra work to implement, and since the LR team keeps coming up with excuses to not having customizable keyboard shortctus, I think it's safe to say that this feature won't be implemented any time soon or ever. \$\endgroup\$
    – Pichan
    Feb 3, 2014 at 15:17
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Pichan Ehh... Lightroom uses the original image for all operations and certain effects will not work post-resized. Lens distortion correction for example would need the full image to calculate the distortion of the frame. Should the crop and resize operation occur before the distortion correction (and somehow it was unable to know that the cropped image only represents a small subset of the image) then you'll end up with quite a messed up image. Of course, should they allow you to set a filter order all would be good. Shouldn't be too hard to implement either. \$\endgroup\$
    – initramfs
    Feb 3, 2014 at 16:38
  • \$\begingroup\$ Since this isn't Adobe feature request forum and my skills in english are limited, I might've been a bit unclear. What I meant was that I'd like to have an option for LR to apply pixel size dependent adjustments/filters post-resize, so photos cropped to 10x10 and 1000x1000 would both show the same size grain when exported into same resolution. Distortion correction can be done at any point as long as LR knows the original dimensions. \$\endgroup\$
    – Pichan
    Feb 6, 2014 at 2:45

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