Lightroom clarity without Lightroom sharpening

A very recent thread discussed whether to capture sharpen in LR or PS with PK Sharpener.

I do my capture sharpening in PS with PK Sharpener, but I also like the clarity slider in LR, so what I've been doing is:

1. No sharpening in LR.
2. Set clarity (and lots of other things other than sharpening) in LR.
3. Export to PS for capture sharpening, adjustment for printing using soft-proofing, and output sharpening.

What I've been wondering about is whether clarity without sharpening is a good idea. Part of me thinks it doesn't matter, because I never saw anything that said that the order of steps in LR mattered. Or, maybe it does?

Ideas?

--Marc
http://basepath.com

Marc - The clarity slider in Lightroom is a form of Local Contrast Enhancement. This is what is done if you run USM with a low amount and high radius (usually something like like 10, 50, 0), although the clarity slider is a little more advanced. So while clarity improves contrast and apparent sharpness, it shouldn't really affect your sharpening flow.

And as far as Lightroom goes, and PS for that matter, the oder of things does matter - you're operating on different valued pixels in each step, affected by the previous step. For things like contrast enhancement and sharpening, though, I don't think you'll notice much difference in the order.

Marc - sorry for the double post, but I was thinking about my answer again. I've only used lightroom for some JPG editing, not for RAW file processing. I suppose it's possible that operations used to process the RAW file into a JPG are always applied in a way that affects the original pixel. Meaning that they'd be order independent. I'm not sure how this would work, personally, but it might be possible. I'd be curious to know if you find out for sure.

As far as I have read or heard, the processing order is not really important on any format in Lightroom - it stores the changes seperately to the original file and only applies them when you edit file in another tool (from the Lightroom menu), print, create JPGs or create a slideshow etc.

The only 'exception' I can think of right now would be how you view the histogram when you work - cropping, saturation etc do change the histogram, so previous actions may need to be changed (for example if you used 'fill light').

Mark - Just because the changes are stored separately, doesn't mean that the order is not important. (If that's what you were saying.) In order to show you the image, these changes must be applied to what you're looking at, so the order may be important still.

If you think of each change as an adjustment layer, then you could move them up or down the layer stack, and get different results. Sure, it doesn't change the original image, but the order still matters. I'm not certain this is the correct analogy though.

Marc, maybe you could try some extreme adjusments in LR in different orders? I would think 2 or 3 adjusments that are very strong would show you whether or not order matters. I'm not certain which operations would be best though.

David,
As Mark noted, all of the editing instructions are stored and applied to the output file in an optimum sequence determined by Lightroom, regardless of the order in which you selected them. In general there is a logical workflow, i.e. most would recommend setting the white balance first, before adjusting saturations, etc., but the sequence in which you get to the final settings does not change the output file processing.

That is a fundamental difference between editing RAW files in LR vs. editing PSD, TIFF or JPEG files in Photoshop.

Marc,
Setting clarity LR and doing all of your sharpening in Photoshop will not create any problems.
Many prefer to do all sharpening with Photoshop or other plugins where they have more control.

Thanks Bill, explains what I was trying to say much better

Thanks Bill...that's nice to know.

Thanks everyone! I've got it now...

--Marc