On the other hand, you and Mark Segal actually analyzed the method and identified some shortcomings
Bill
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Bill, thanks for the credit, but it was actually Jonathan Wienke who made the first analytical comment in this thread about the wrong emphasis the procedure would produce, then some time after Jeff's analytic post, I followed-up with a comment on the relationship between two steps in the procedure dealing with the black mask and the treatment of noise, also raised a question about Dan's intro, wondering what bright colour has to do with sharpening, but the main emphasis of my comment was on the need for a proof of concept using a methodology we could consider scientifically valid based on what we now know about sharpening issues - thanks to the late Bruce Fraser and his colleagues.
Turning to Gloria's *astonishment* about what has happened in this discussion thread, Gloria, what you're seeing, as you can understand from Andrew's message, is a lot of attenae up, because of the rather sorry history of the recent past concerning the Camera Raw discussion, the Black and White Adjustment Layer discussion, the moderating practices on ACTL, etc.- all of Dan's making I might add; but "obeying strict rules of justice" and confining the scope to the case in hand, it's hard to avoid noticing the way in which this procedure was launched.
Now here, I don't want to sound unreasonable, but we are talking about material coming from one of the world's foremost professionals in this field. Therefore we have a natural tendancy to hold him to an appropriately high standard in terms of his technical output. The statement of principles underlying the procedure was - to put it mildly - thin, and likely contains errors mentioned above. There are precious few explanations underlying the rationale for the various steps. Explanation of methodology for using it is also thin. Even a very preliminary comparison to demonstrate its value of the kind "flashlight" produced on DPReview wasn't provided. It was kind of thrown out as a "here - test this and comment" request. Now any one who wants to argue back that Dan is in travel status - my response would be fine - wait until you can do it properly.
Putting it out this way itself demonstrates to me that perhaps Dan hasn't fully internalized the true scope of the sharpening challenge, because if he did, he would have realized that a proof of concept in this particular area really needs *a lot* of concentrated effort using a well-selected and representative matrix of cases - provided both the underlying principles and preliminary spot-tests indicate the procedure may have real merit and therefore deserves more thorough testing. That, however, has been seriously questioned over the past couple of days and should provide useful feedback for Dan. Whether he agrees with it of course remains to be seen. He could also make a positive contribution by participating in the technical aspects of the discussion on and in this Forum.
