Uh huh...capture sharpened how? With what settings?
If I want to apply capture sharpening, I usually use the FocusMagic plug-in in Photoshop because it integrates nicely with my workflow. The settings I used were (cryptically) mentioned in the file name; Focusmagic=FM, settings Radius=1 and amount is 175. The settings were chosen visually from the small preview, and they can vary with the lens/aperture used, and with the focus quality (I used Live View to focus on the name shield of the windmill). No difficult determination of PSFs was required, it was just done by eye.
I think what this proves is NOT that capture sharpening is bad, but that a single bicubic sharper downsample of a large file is bad...
Well, it shows that the Adobe recommended downsampling method doesn't play well with sharpening prior to downsampling. I agree that by jumping through some hoops better results can be obtained, but why do we need to?
in Photoshop I do multiple bicubic downsample processes till I get close to the final needed size than do a final bicubic sharper for the last resample...or, I use Camera Raw or Lightroom to get the image close to the final needs size with a last touch of resample (often bicubic) to get the exact size...unfortunately, at this time Camera Raw's size and resolution controls suck so I would suggest Lightroom for a comparison since there you can be precise with pixel dimension...
Sure that will work, but it's quite a convoluted workflow to do something as common as repurposing an image for web display or thumbnail generation.
If you want to upload the raw file I'll compare...I have no interest flailing around with a jpeg.
I don't share Raw files, besides there is not much wrong with a highest quality JPEG when each 49 pixels get squeezed into a single pixel at output, especially when the mode is first changed to 16 bpc before downsampling. I also want to avoid an apples and oranges comparison between different Raw converters, such a comparison is nice for a different thread. I think the best method to compare sharpening is to base it on the same source data.
Nevertheless, for the people with adequate download bandwidth, I'll make available 2 crops from the original unsharpened (no noise reduction either) Capture One 4.0.0 conversion. They are 16bpc TIFFs converted to AdobeRGB, and each crop consists of the original unsharpened background layer, and a Focusmagic sharpened copy of that layer as an example of deconvolution sharpening. The sharpening is as is, neither masks nor blendings were used, just a simple FM filter was applied with the same settings as mentioned above. The result can of course be improved by adding an edge mask, but masking skills are not the subject of investigation here.
Here they are (ZIP compressed TIFFs, but that shouldn't be a problem for Photoshop users):
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvdwolf/temp/7640_CO40_Crop1.tif (filesize approx. 20MB)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvdwolf/temp/7640_CO40_Crop2.tif (filesize approx. 30MB)
To reproduce the effects I showed earlier, just increase the canvas size to 3744 px wide by 5616 px high, and (after optional capture sharpening) resample down to 533x800 pixels to get the same dimensions as the small JPEGs above.
Happy flailing,
Bart