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Perhaps the biggest complaint I hear when photographers first venture from the comfortable world of JPEG shooting into the unknown territory of RAW is "my pictures just aren't as sharp as when I shot in JPEG! I thought RAW was suppossed to be better?" Better is a moving target. What is better depends greatly upon the circumstances surrounding your shoot. But, if you really want to capture the maximum information your camera can give you and YOU want to make the processing decisions about that information then RAW is the ONLY way to shoot.

The first of such decisions centers around sharpening your images. Yes, RAW images do look "fuzzier" than their JPEG cousins. That's because when you shoot JPEG your camera is making those sharpening decisions for you before it serves up the already baked image. With RAW you now get to decide what gets sharpened and how it gets sharpened.

There are three main sharpening stages:

• Input or Capture Sharpening
• Creative Sharpening
• Output Sharpening

In the simplest of terms sharpening looks to find those areas where light and dark edges meet and enhance that contrast without generating edge artifacts (such as halos). Capture sharpening will adjust the image as it comes in from the camera to a point where you think the image should be. Capture sharpening should be applied as a first stage before you do anything else to your image. Once you have the sharpness you desire on input you can make better decisions about where to go from there.

Both Lightroom and Camera Raw offers excellent capture sharpening functionality. Make sure you've upgraded to the latest versions - Lightroom 1.1 and Camera raw 4.1 . If your workflow starts in Photoshop you can also achieve excellent capture sharpening. There are many third party plugin applications out there to make your Photoshop sharpening tasks easier but by far the best is Photokit Sharpener from the folks over at Pixel Genius . This plugin covers all three sharpening stages excellently.

Capture sharpening is arguably the easiest of the three stages but a necessary step in the creative process if you are cosidering output of any significant size. We'll talk more in future articles about creative and output sharpening.

For you Lightroom users, I've included a zip file of four capture sharpening presets that mimic the capture sharpening from Photokit Sharpener. Just unzip the file and place in your Lightroom presets directory.