Robert, your pen-ultimate post is all largely correct. But you omitted what for some - perhaps many - of us could be the biggest constraint of all: TIME. The value of time spent image editing needs to be considered - to me anyhow, it is the scarcest of resources. For that reason, a Lightroom workflow is really hard to beat because for many peoples' needs the program design is so very good. I make it a habit of exploiting Lightroom to the fullest before turning to anything else. I think roughly 95% of my image editing is done in LR without going into any other application. The other 5% usually happens either because I need to de-skew a perspective (LR 5 can't yet do this properly) or I need some kind of mask or mask-based adjustment that is hard to implement correctly in LR, though with version 5 even that has become very much better. So again, not wanting to hijack the thread from its original intent, the sharpening question does have this as context, and I believe a good number of professionals would share my perspective that if one is to move out of LR, there needs to be significant value-added for the time commitment to be worthwhile.
Re your post immediately above, I too like to understand what I'm doing, and to the extent my professional abilities allow - understand what's happening under the hood. In this regard = w.r.t. sharpening, I think Jeff Schewe's book provides a huge amount of excellent insight that is as valid for Photokit Sharpener, as it is for LR/ACR, and as it may be for other acutance-based applications on the market. In LR there are just a few sliders to play with, but once one really understands how to use them, it provides a very flexible and effective "sharpening" package. One is not confined to dialing-in presets or set numbers.
Totally Mark - I'm not running down Lr for a minute. I use it all the time and even though every now and then I'll get tempted by Capture One, or check out what DCRAW can do ... so far I've always gone back to Lr and like it a lot. I think the sharpening is excellent ... the Masking adjustment is brilliant (you would think that 'Smart Sharpen' would have a feature like that!). I often use the ACR sharpening instead of Smart Sharpen in Photoshop (with the CC Camera Raw filter and before that with Dr Brown's Edit Layer in ACR script). You can then dial-down the haloes (if any) using the Photoshop advanced blending features, set the layer blend mode to Luminosity to avoid color artifacts (or set the Smart Filter blend mode to Luminosity) etc.
So far I've always used Lr for printing and the printing functionality is excellent (and consistent with the rest of Lr, which is an important consideration). Output sharpening in Lr is just too basic IMO, so I've always output sharpened my images in Photoshop (I'm REALLY fussy about sharpening in prints ... I think bad sharpening is one of the quickest and easiest ways to ruin a print).
Getting very familiar with one's tools is a really important thing, IMO, because then we have a better chance of getting the best out of them ... so I really wouldn't advocate changing for the sake of change. What I'm doing at the moment is just reviewing things to see if there are better ways of working. That's a useful thing to do also ... every now and then ... providing it doesn't become a full-time occupation, which this is in danger of becoming!
I think Mike Chaney's comment was very fair: he claims that QImage will do as good a job as the best packages currently available, but he doesn't claim that one can't achieve as good a result with another package. Bart also said that if you're prepared to spend the time at it that you can probably achieve better results than with QImage running automatically (presumably he included doing further processing in QImage itself as well as Photoshop or whatever).
I personally don't really need to print multiple prints at the same time (sure, sometimes yes, but I can always manage in Lightroom or even Photoshop). If that's something one does a lot, then that is one area where QImage really shines. The flexibility of layout, borders, adding text, sharpening, resize algorithms, anti-aliasing etc., is fantastic for a package at that price. If you are doing that a lot it would be worth getting a PC just for printing. If I was a wedding photographer, for example, I wouldn't hesitate for long.
For me it comes down more to the quality of the resizing algorithms and the output sharpening (and also the anti-aliasing for downsampling, which can potentially be a problem).
Robert
