No sharpening in post process! How you can achieve that?

Question

Some professionals do not sharpen their raw photos when they postprocess them and the result is still great! How is that possible? Quality of lenses? Different workaround? Thank you!

Answer 1

Quality of lenses, stopping down a bit from the maximum aperture of lens and desired depth of field, arrangement of the scene by grouping elements to appear in focus into a comparatively "flat layer". And not overdoing resolution.

Of course it helps if your camera is a "resolution underachiever" compared to the lens quality. I like my ancient DSC-R1 camera from 2005: pretty good (fixed) lens, APS-C class sensor (crop factor 1.66), just 10MP, non-BSI CMOS sensor. That means that the actual light sensitive areas are small enough to have quite lacklustre high-ISO performance given the large sensor size and small pixel count, but have considerable separation, leading to an image that is quite well-defined at the pixel level.

Of course, if you have higher sensor resolution to work with, scaling down should also work to provide images that are comparatively well-defined at the pixel level.

Sharpening comes at a cost of noise, and noise can be kept low by keeping scenes well-exposed. For studio (and a number of other explicitly lit scenes) you can keep ISO values low enough that at least noisiness for a quite basic sharpening level is not much of an issue. However, other image operations like local contrast enhancements or tone mapping also come at a cost in noise while providing more striking effects at larger scales.

I can well imagine that with a carefully set up scene, photographers would prefer investing their noise headroom for more global effects rather than improvements at the pixel level.