Sharpening in Adobe Camera Raw

It took me a couple minutes to figure out why my sharpening wasn't doing anything when the image opened in Photoshop. It was because the default in the sharpening dialog is to apply the sharpening to the "Preview Only." Why would you want to do that? What would be the point of previewing something, but not being able to apply it?

Pete: You might want to do that for the following reason. The sharpening in ACR is input sharpening and not necessarily at the final output size. It gives you the ability to preview what you can expect when you do the final output sharpening, which of course should be the last step in any workflow prior to printing (or sending to the web). Some folks like to do input sharpening and change that preference to actually apply the sharpening, others do not. I'm guessing Adobe took the conservative approach and left the default at "Preview Only"

Thanks Keith. I guess that makes sense to someone. To me, it still seems strange to preview the result of something you won't ever do. I am assuming my Photoshop sharpening uses a different algorithm - at least the dialog looks different. So, who cares what ACR might have done on the input end?

Pete D.

Pete - I agree that that's fairly useless, but just because the algorithms are different, doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good approximation. In any case, I think you'll find that the default is "All Images" and you must have accidentally moved it to "Preview Only". I just reset my ACR preferences (hold Shift-Ctrl-Alt while opening a RAW file from Bridge) to defaults to check, and it reverts to "All Images".

I have ACR set to preview only. It helps with the previewing of images, but I convert without sharpening because I have separate capture/output sharpening processes for my exported images.