Sharpening with DPP.

Any simple guidelines to use Strength, Fineness and Threshold sliders for sharpening using DPP.

Thanks

I much prefer the older 'Sharpness' tool.

With the USM variant I've never been able to achieve the same smooth, natural sharpness. Especially on portraits, where USM is quick to produce 'sugaring' in the hair.

If 'Sharpness' doesn't do, I use FocalBlade on the TIFF.

I can't prove some of the things I am going to say but I have compared quite a bit between Sharpness and Unsharp Mask in DPP and between those and USM in Photoshop so I'm pretty confident that I'm not far off in my conclusions:

- Sharpness in DPP is actually closer to a normal Unsharp Mask than DPP's Unsharp Mask. The only thing is that the radius and threshold are fixed and you can't change them.

- Unsharp Mask in DPP is similar to a normal Unsharp Mask but it clamps the white halos. This is sort of similar to using a Blend-if layer in Photoshop to prevent white halos.

- Both Sharpness and Unsharp Mask in DPP allow you to set crazy-high amounts/intensities. If you max them out, it is the equivalent of multiple applications of the USM filter in Photoshop at its maximum amount. In other words, a little goes a long way. Also, you need to be careful when using Sharpness or Unsharp Mask with a Threshold since you can easily over-sharpen hard edges without noticing.

- Just to add to the last point, due to the crudeness of DPP's sharpening, I would highly recommend doing all sharpening operations while viewing at 100% or even 200%.

- Ultimately, I would use sharpening in DPP only if I absolutely had to and then only for a mild amount of capture sharpening - say Unsharp Mask using something around 1/1/1 for Strength/Fineness/Thre​shold. Threshold is a very crude, basic tool for varying sharpness between hard edges and softer texture and it will introduce artifacts if combined with a high amount/intensity and can produce a very artificial-looking image where hard edges are sharp and texture is a blurry mess. Also, it's worth mentioning again that the intensity/amount sliders in DPP's sharpening filters are extremely amplified so normally anything above about 3 means your image is over-sharpened.