And by who is "sharpening poorly understood to begin with"?
Hi Mark,
I said "
Proper(!) sharpening is poorly understood to begin with, and the standard tools are lacking in capability."
Lot's of misguided advice about sharpening is floating around on the internet, most of it are old insights based on pre-digital concepts, such as USM sharpening. One of the better references is Real World Image Sharpening, by Bruce Frazer and Jeff Schewe, but a large proportion of that is also about hiding the halo artifacts caused by using sub-par techniques such as the Sharpening tools in LR and Photoshop.
Anybody who doesn't know about the difference between (deconvolution) sharpening and (USM type) edge contrast boosting, will have a lot of latent quality in their images that they are not utilizing.
And what "standard tools are lacking in (what kind of) capability"? I find these statements kind of cavalier. You find Focus Magic and Topaz Detail satisfying - that's your observation for what you do, and so be it, but don't cast aspersions on other people who find other tools perfectly satisfactory for their requirements.
If you think that I'm the only one who is very pleased with the superior capabilities of these tools, then you are mistaken. Everybody in the field of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) knows that deconvolution is the proper way to restore resolution, instead of boosting edge contrast to fool our eyes. Real resolution can be restored, as was required for the early Hubble Space Telescope imagery which revealed a
design flaw that caused blurred detail. A software deconvolution process, i.e. Richardson-Lucy deconvolution, restored a lot of the resolution that was inititially missing.
The implementation of deconvolution (Detail slider blends between USM-type and Deconvolution-type of sharpening) in e.g. Lightroom is rather poor compared to the alternatives mentioned. Artifacts and halos are mentioned often as negative side effects, and the edge masking is there for a very good reason, given the shortcomings. The Detail panel even starts with setting the Amount slider instead of the Radius slider, which is the wrong order of adjustment for Capture sharpening. It also doesn't use EXIF information (Apterture used, focus disctance, sensel pitch, ISO) that can be used to preset reasonable defaults.
By the way, Capture sharpening is a correction of purely hardware characterized blur that's inherent to the capture process. It requires different settings than for Creative 'sharpening', yet the same settings are used in the standard tools of LR and similar.
It's not the fault of individuals that the tools they are offered provide lower quality than the tools I mentioned. So if they are satisfied with the best their software has to offer, fine. But that doesn't mean that they cannot improve the quality of their images, if they care. They just need to use other tools, and they may like what they can achieve then, better than what they can do now. They can also ignore the improvement suggestions, fine with me.
I'm hesitating to demonstrate the benefits of better tools, because I might get labeled obsessive, or casting aspersions on other people. I certainly do not want to waste my and your time explaining if that is not appreciated.
Cheers,
Bart