Output sharpening

can Lightroom's output sharpening be used for photos that are made by exposing on silver halide?

can Lightroom's output sharpening be used for photos that are made by exposing on silver halide?

 

I don't see why not (as with any sharpening). Lightroom's output sharpening is intended to apply to the final stage in image production, after you've done any creative editing, as a means to compensate for reduction in sharpness due to image resizing or to compensate for blurring caused by the printing process (or to boost local contrast to allow for the final viewing distance). The image creation method (photographic film, a digital sensor or computer-generated imagery) should be irrelevant for this; you might also want to apply input sharpening to compensate for softness in the film itself or in the scan process before you edit the image. Once you have the image data in the computer, an image is an image. The only thing you might want to be wary of is that film is inherently somewhat grainy, and that you might make the grain appear worse through excessive sharpening; you can probably compensate for this with some noise reduction in Lightroom.

 

Just to be clear: when you say "photos made by exposing on silver halide", I've assumed you mean that the original image is captured on film, the result is scanned, and you're then processing it in Lightroom. If you mean that you have an image in Lightroom and you're intending to turn it into an output print directly on photographic film (simplistically by photographing the screen or putting it in front of a digital projector, but proper transfer mechanisms exist), then yes, you can still use output sharpening, but I'd have no idea what would be the most appropriate settings for that application; I would expect some softness to be introduced during the transfer, and that sharpening would therefore be useful.

 

I hope that helps.