How can we get the same effect in Photoshop that we get from Clarity in Lightroom?

juandent@mac.com  wrote ...(without using Camera Raw or Lightroom, that is?) Clarity means midtone contrast -- how can we get that in Photoshop? We need to use curves or  levels?

Yes, you could use Curves, or maybe Levels if you used BlendIf to constrain the correction to the midtones.

Clarity means more than just midtone contrast. There are some other optimizations that are done, like enhancing local contrast.

There are a couple of ways to approximate what Clarity does. One is to use Unsharp Mask with the old HiRaLoAm technique. HiRaLoAm stands for High Radius, Low Amount: Choose Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask, enter a high Radius value (relative to the image resolution), and a low Amount value like 10%. Another way is to use the High Pass Sharpening method.

If you're very interested in this, get a copy of the book The Digital Negative by Jeff Schewe. On page 5 he says

I use Clarity a lot, but...I. often prefer to make my midtones contrast adjustments in Photoshop because of the flexibility it offers. (I’ll show you how to do that in Chapter 5.)

In Chapter 5 he goes into more details about midtone contrast techniques, combining a lot of ideas already mentioned, like the High Pass filter with the Overlay blending mode, and using BlendIf to limit the correction to the midtones.

This is why the Clarity slider is so great. The engineers gathered together what used to be complicated multi-step Photoshop techniques, and reduced them to a single easy slider.