Hi again, John -
Although one can not possibly do as well trying to sharpen a JPG compared to sharpening a RAW file, attached is a demo that shows that one can get a good bit of the way there sharpening your unsharpened JPG using LR 5.6. I zipped three files together so there is no way the files might be modified by the forum's rather crude (when it comes to compressing) file uploading software. The three files in the zip are:
1 = no USM by you; no LR sharpening or other changes by me;
2 = USM by you; no changes made my me;
3 = no USM by you; I sharpened #1 using LR 5.6 using the settings shown in the attached screen shot.
As can be seen, there is a huge difference between #1 and either #2 or #3, but much a smaller difference between #2 and #3. To my eye, the primary difference between #2 and #3 is that the very brightest and very darkest tones are not sharpened as much. This is typical of the difference between sharpening a RAW file vs attempting to sharpen the corresponding JPG.
Should you be able to upload the corresponding raw file, I'll be happy to have a go at that, as well.
Cheers,
Tom
PS - For what it's worth, over the years, I've participated in dozens of threads about sharpening ( ... mostly on photo.net), and read (but did not participate in) many hundreds more. Using the terminology of the 3 step sharpening method that I mentioned earlier, I've seen general agreement about the advantages of doing the middle "creative" sharpening step in PS instead of LR, but I've never seen anyone complain about the quality of LR's initial sharpening step, "intake sharpening", which is what this discussion is about. For example, I'm quite sure I've never seen anyone before this feel that there was a need to bring images back into LR after processing in PS. The workflow is *always* (...including many, many pros) LR to PS, and then, on limited occasions back into LR to make use of LR's facilities to produce a slide show, a PDR or Blub book, HTML for a quick web gallery, contact sheets, etc.
