Building a Sharpening WorkflowIn the last chapter, we saw that sharpening has to take into account several different and often contradictory demands. In this chapter, I'll offer a means of reconciling these disparate demands, while pointing out the potential pitfalls in doing so. Having tried for decades to meet all the requirements imposed by image source, image content, and image use in a single sharpening operation, I've reluctantly concluded that it is in fact impossible to do so. Of course, this conclusion flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which dictates that sharpening should be applied in a single pass as either the last or next-to-last step (before conversion to final CMYK in an RGB workflow) in the image reproduction chain. But the conventional wisdom does have some foundation.
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