Downsampling question.

Yes, the separate layer sharpening is useful for all the reasons Stephen mentioned.

Personally I found the ACR filter made most of that redundant. All of those blending effects can be achieved in one go in ACR, and in many cases even better.

The main thing is to avoid halos and other artifacts. Starting out with Detail=0 in ACR does that, it tightens up edges only, at the given radius. Then add Detail carefully to taste, and masking to protect flat areas.

But sharpening is a matter of personal preferences. Which is exactly why the Bicubic Sharper algorithm should be avoided.

Thanks for all your replies. Very much appreciated and very helpful. I will avoid using Bicubic Sharper in future then as it seems that it is not the best option to use. A friend of mine one told me he resizes for sharing online and then creates a new layer and adds a smart sharpen filter to it but I find that too agressive as well. I do mostly bird photos so a lot of fine edges in the birds feathers. Plus aviation too where there’s fine detail on the bodywork but also lots of plain panels with no detail.

In most cases this is a solution in search of a problem. There are many challenges during a normal workday, but this isn't one of them.

The critical part is to control the final-size sharpening, meaning the resampling itself should do as little as possible of it. Bicubic Smoother is fine.

There is one possible exception: Thin lines - telephone wires, suspension bridges, that sort of thing. That too usually works fine, but in some rare cases a little special care is needed. Sometimes a two-step downsampling improves it a bit.

Still, going from 7K pixels to 1K or so, something has to go.

As Dag has said, Bicubic Sharper is the work of the devil, and best avoided if you have a have decent original image.  Ì set Preferences to Bilinear, and sharpen after downsizing _if_ required.

Yes, I agree with D Fosse: Photoshop's Bicubic Sharper doesn't yield good results due to too much built-in sharpening.

In my experience, and testing done by others, Catmul-Rom gives some of the best downsampling results of all downsampling algorithms, but you guessed it: Photoshop doesn't include it. Which is a real shame. Which is also the reason why I avoid Photoshop for any downsampling work.