I hope no one minds that I reply to an older post; with Bruce Frazer's untimely passing, I can't help but reply...
If Brooks Jensen's words are an example of any sort of schism in the photographic world, it is one that pre-dates computers. Years ago, had someone writen a book about unsharp masking, Mr Jensen could have and might have said the same things about that book. I don't know it, but I doubt that any fine art photographer has made a photo print using an unsharp mask. I do know enough to think that very few images in coffee table books of fine art photography have been set to half tone print without unsharp masks. Since the start of half tone seperation printing, a majority of professional photography has been displayed or reproduced on paper, with ink. More or less, that was and is the dicodomy of the fine art and the commercial photographers' worlds.
Bruce Frazer jokingly gave himself the mantle of the 'World's Worst Photographer'. It wasn't quite true, but it reflects the difference between the image or art centered world and the output or ink printing centered world. He was a guru and genius when and where 'the ink hit the paper,' the output centered world.
With the demise of wet, chemical photography, and the ubiquity of inkjet printing, we photographers will all have to enter the 'ink and paper' world, and understand the 'old' pratices of the image setting world. (Some art photographers, like Michael, got it quickly.) With the inkjet, we are now all our own image setters.
vis the Photokit Sharpener, if you know sharpening and can sharpen your printed images well, PKS won't do any better than what your already doing. But if you don't know sharpening, use PKS or another plug-in, or don't sharpen at all, for bad sharpening looks dumb, much worse than no sharpening.
As an aside, I just bought a photography magazine, partly on the strength of the inside cover advertisement, for an inkjet printer. The ad' is a double page studio pic of a beautiful woman model, laying supine. Emphasized crops of the picture show the brand-of-printers' ability to render, in print, the model's perfect skin color, her vivid red lipstick lips, and the individual sharp black hairs of her eyelashes. I was 45 minutes on my way home, fantasizing about printing my own pictures with one of those printers, before I realized that the image I was attributing to 'that-brand-of-printers' was, in fact, just an image of processe inks on web fed press paper... The rest of my way home I fantasised of having the unsung (but I hope, well paid) pre-press person who did the ad, of having that person set my photos to print.... as if I could buy him or her for the price of a inkjetprinter
Also, most important to those who make their living from these subjects: The sub-titles of Bruce's books are 'Industrial Strength Production Techniques For The Real World etc' They are exactly aimed at the world where 'the invoice smacks the client'...