Do you do your sharpening in RAW?

[NorCalAl]

Or once it's converted? If you do sharpening in RAW, do you find differences in the different converters?
I wondered about conversion programs before and found that many, many folks asked the same questions and much like the 24-105 vs 24-70 debate, most folks had grown weary of answering yet another post on conversion apps.
But what I'm really wondering - and was then, too, just worded it poorly - is if you do your sharpening in RAW, do you find that you like one converter app over another? Or perhaps more importantly, is there an app you feel does a poor job of RAW sharpening?
I like the sharpening options in DxO, but find the app is very slow. Bibble is really fast, but the sharpening leaves much to be desired. And DPP is fast, has good (to me) sharpening, but lacks some of the flexibility of both Bibble and DxO. Then there's Lightroom...seems to sharpen well, pretty fast and has lots of flexibility.
I'd really love to just use one app, but it seems that different shots demand different processing. Or am I making too much of it?

[CyberDyneSystems]

I tend to do it only in PSCS after conversion.. but there are times I will do it in the raw converter.. particularly when I used to work with Captrue 1

[drogos]

i always do sharpening in Phase one capture to get a "usable " file and than if necessary i add some sharpnesss to eyes in ps ...it's tricky since what you see in phase one is not what you see afterwards in ps ...algorythm for sharpening is pretty strange and it almost looks like sharpening setting is override by some defaults ...so i tent to oversharpen in phase one (200%) to get just right on the spot in ps ..but well i guess there is never to late for sharpening but it can be defenetly to early at times

[Bodog]

Something I read on some post processing guru's website (can't remember which) struck me as meaningful: Only sharpen enough at the conversion stage to offset any blurring caused by the de-mosaicing filter. I find that the default setting in C1 does a good job in that respect. Any further sharpening should be done after the conversion and depends on the individual image and it's intended use.

[memorex88]

I don't but I asked my wife if I could take a pic of her sharpening a knife in the nude, She refused

[cosworth]

Hell no.

My sharpening is the last step in PP and involves an action with about 40 steps. RAW sharpening is not that precise.

[ssim]

Depends on the image. I will sometimes give a very slight amount of sharpening in C1 Pro at the time I do my conversion.

It has long been the standard that sharpening should be your very last step in your post processing workflow. In the past year though, I have seen some of those same people say that they have started to do some very light sharpening at the time of conversion. Things do change and the software applications that support this sharpening have made progress as well.

This really boils down to a personal preference and how good your final product is. If doing an initial amount of sharpening works for you and the image benefits from it, I don't see an issue with doing it.

[bsmotril]

Sharpening is one of the areas where Photoshop is superior to RAW. Most of the operations you do in RAW don't change the actual raw data, they just affect the metadata putting markers there that tells Photoshop how to do the Gamma correction, and present the image by way of setting the dark and highlight points in the data set. When you sharpen, you are actually changing pixel data, which is what PS does. When you sharpen in raw, all you do is change the way the thumbnail and JPEG image are presented on your screen, no pixel data is changed (or lost, which is the real benefit of adjusting all your levels, color, contrast, exposure, etc in RAW vs PS). Do your sharpening as your last processing step.

[Beau Hudspeth]

Originally Posted by cosworth

My sharpening is the last step in PP and involves an action with about 40 steps.

I'm curious to see that action please!

[cgratti]

Dont sharpen in RAW, there is a better way to sharpen in PS.

Duplicate the layer.
Click FILTER>OTHER>HIGH PASS and at 7.0
The picture will now look Chrome and ugly.
Set the BLENDING MODE in the layers palette to SOFT OVERLAY and viola!

[Pete]

No, Sharpening in ACR won't be much good at all. Although it's useful to start your noise reduction there.

I've found that actions and recipies for sharpening will give you acceptable, but not good results. The best sharpening is when it's tailored for the image itself (and even then targeted for parts of the image that actually need it). Multi-pass sharpening is the way to go, if you can spend the time doing it.

[peber]

Originally Posted by Pete

No, Sharpening in ACR won't be much good at all. Although it's useful to start your noise reduction there.

I've found that actions and recipies for sharpening will give you acceptable, but not good results. The best sharpening is when it's tailored for the image itself (and even then targeted for parts of the image that actually need it). Multi-pass sharpening is the way to go, if you can spend the time doing it.

Slightly OT, is there a tutorial somewhere how to do multi-pass sharpening?

/Per

[tim]

I'm a wedding photographer, I only occasionally sharpen. I've done my experiments, in print, not at the almost useless 100% view in photoshop. Take a look at the prints if you do and don't sharpen, after that you'll worry less. That's a good general rule: try it every way you can think of, print it, if your wife/girlfriend/whatever can't tell them apart then miss the step out, it's not important.

[mace0002]

Originally Posted by Beau Hudspeth

I'm curious to see that action please!

I would too!!

[SuzyView]

Never sharpen in RAW, only in PS.