I have started to use Adobe Camera Raw. Although it has a number of advantages, it does have the distinct disadvantage of losing the excellent sharpening results produced by LinearSharpenMenu and LinearSharpen 3.42. I have developed an action set, ACR Menus, to work in conjunction with Camera Raw that extracts some of the components of the old LinearSharpenMenu and also incorporates noise reduction from Pekka Saarinen's LS D60 action.
It is intended that the user converts a raw file using suitable Camera Raw settings including some level of sharpening. The image will not be fully sharpened - this is done by using ACR menus. The converted image can then have custom edits, such as levels and curves, applied, if desired, before executing ACR Menus, which provides final sharpening and noise reduction.
The settings in the download version of ACR Menus are designed for use with the Canon EOS D30. Later in this article, I explain how you can modify these settings to suit different cameras.
1 Apr '03: A new version, 1.1, is available. There is only one change of any significance: a new level of sharpening - 6 - has been added. I have been experimenting with this action on images from my new 10D. It seems to work quite well, but sometimes these images can be take a little extra sharpening, hence, the modification.
I have tested the action with images converted using ACR, BreezeBrowser 2.6 and Canon's own File Viewer Utility. The results are all very acceptable with little sign of sharpening artefacts; the Silence Noise option seems to work very well.
There has also been a minor change to the levels command within the mask subroutine intended to increase the focus of the USM.