I've been playing around with adding a deconvolution sharpening step into my RAW conversion a bit.
My conclusions :
1. It works very well in controlled conditions esp. landscape and portrait sessions. All that is needed is to batch process the same sharpening parameters to all the shots.
2. Its not practical in many other situations (eg. travels; walkabouts; family shots) where conditions and settings change (eg. ISO). So the user has to go thru which shots use what sharpening setting. Obviously time consuming and a pain.
Sharpening and NR has to be done at larger magnification unlike other tweaks like exposure/WB so its more painful and slow and can't be waved off with a statement like
"You'd need to do RAW processing anyway"
3. It accentuates noise. Obviously less so with low ISO shots and Pentax's very nice low+smooth noise grains RAWs.
Played with the same sharpening on D90 and 5D RAWs and they were horrendous (esp. the D90)
But its very obvious in ISO800 and above. Better results can be yielded thru individual tweaking of the sharpening settings per higher ISO shot, but then again its a pain if each tour day yielded 200-400 shots.
As mentioned by another poster, we pay so much for the diminishing returns on lenses, we can fork out that $100 more for the straight out gain from the AA-filterless.
Edit :
Its always easy to take some controlled shot in the internet and tweak that 1 shot to show that its better.
Try that over a real world use of hundreds of shots taken in a photo session/outing and the same workflow formula does not work out as well.
For the photographer who lives and shoots for himself, it may still work out by reducing the number of keepers and junking the rest before applying deconvolution sharpening.
But for the general shooter, I must say that its not as plain sailing.
Of course everyone likes to get better performance w/o spending that little bit extra $, so very often we tend to want to believe that deconvolution sharpening will remedy all that difference.
MHO.
Last edited by pinholecam; 02-26-2013 at 09:50 PM.