What is wrong?

If your fantastic super duper digital camera and hyper sharp lenses are so awesome why does everyone need AI sharpening and all these other dozens of programs to fix the utter failures of their equipment performance?

SOOC should be just fine from your $6K cameras and $12,000K lenses.
But apparently they are hardly sharp at all and desperately need lots of help.
Or is it such poor technique with all this super equipment that the photos need salvaging?

A friend wants to know.

Architect opened an interesting thread on the uses or non-uses of AI plug-ins. But there is one use that none of the respondents mentioned. In fact, I have never seen this use discussed on these pages.
That is the ability to avoid the $6K cameras and the $12K lenses in favor of less expensive, more portable cameras.
Don't get me wrong. I have a very good camera an Olympus E-M1ii and a pro 12-100 lens. this combination must be handled with care, it is so sharp. But I generally use this set up (or primes for indoors) for sports.
But for most everything else, I use a bridge camera--either a Panasonic FZ1000 or ZS100. Both of these are versatile and provide good results. They are much more portable than the Oly, and I waste no time changing lenses. The ZS100 is always with me or in my car. I can't imagine carrying the Oly and a bagful of lenses all of the places I go with my Panasonics. The sharpness may not equal the Oly, but with a touch of AI, they come close.
For the most part I use Topaz AI Clear, which is part of the Topaz Studio plug-in. I find it much faster than Denoise AI or Sharpen AI. It both removes noise at three levels AND sharpens at the same time.
If I have to crop to a small portion of the image, I use On1 Resize rather than Gigapixel, as it is faster and gives more choices for size. The results from these products give quite acceptable results in terms of noise and definition.
By the way, I think the current mania for sharpness is overdone. You can examine an image at 100 or 200 percent looking for noise or lack of sharpness, but if you print the image at a reasonable size, such as 16 x 12 inches, you will never notice the "faults." A wise person once told me that if you can's see it from two feet, it doesn't exist. What is more important to me is the overall impact of the image.

What is wrong?

If your fantastic super duper digital camera and hyper sharp lenses are so awesome why does everyone need AI sharpening and all these other dozens of programs to fix the utter failures of their equipment performance?

SOOC should be just fine from your $6K cameras and $12,000K lenses.
But apparently they are hardly sharp at all and desperately need lots of help.
Or is it such poor technique with all this super equipment that the photos need salvaging?

A friend wants to know.

What is wrong?

If your fantastic super duper digital camera and hyper sharp lenses are so awesome why does everyone need AI sharpening and all these other dozens of programs to fix the utter failures of their equipment performance?

SOOC should be just fine from your $6K cameras and $12,000K lenses.
But apparently they are hardly sharp at all and desperately need lots of help.
Or is it such poor technique with all this super equipment that the photos need salvaging?

A friend wants to know.

I have a good camera (D800) albeit long in the tooth now. The last lens I purchased was a Nikon 28-300, used, about 5 years ago. Before that was in 2001. Some of my lenses are brand name, others not. I'm closer to 80 than 70. I've been photographing since 1963 when I shot my first wedding. I've never been happy with SOOC images. When I was shooting film I was always a bit disappointed in the sharpness of my images even though I got the best the camera, lens, film could do at the time. Then, we had to settle for what we got. When digital came I jumped in with both feet (mind you, I was an executive of a major film company by then) and I was amazed at what Unsharp Mask could do. Like most of us, I cranked that sucker up so high it made your eyes bleed. So, I see nothing wrong with using whatever tool available to you to bring your images to what you perceived when you shot it. I don't crank up USM any more, in fact I don't even use it. I have a sharpening technique that I've developed using several tools that give my images the look I want. Because that's what we're talking about, isn't it? Not what your equipment can give you but what you can give to your viewer.

No lens is perfect. No lens has the same MTF performance at low contrast as at high contrast. Deconvolution can recreate sharp contrast transitions that the lens blurs. I find it silly not to use whatever tools are available to improve an image. In video, grading is always part of high-end production, sometimes costing thousands of dollars an hour. No high-end production uses images SOOC, and the same can be said about commercial photography. Only amateurs pride themselves on SOOC, because they are either ignorant of or too lazy to do what can be done to improve images in post.

Architect opened an interesting thread on the uses or non-uses of AI plug-ins. But there is one use that none of the respondents mentioned. In fact, I have never seen this use discussed on these pages.
That is the ability to avoid the $6K cameras and the $12K lenses in favor of less expensive, more portable cameras.
Don't get me wrong. I have a very good camera an Olympus E-M1ii and a pro 12-100 lens. this combination must be handled with care, it is so sharp. But I generally use this set up (or primes for indoors) for sports.
But for most everything else, I use a bridge camera--either a Panasonic FZ1000 or ZS100. Both of these are versatile and provide good results. They are much more portable than the Oly, and I waste no time changing lenses. The ZS100 is always with me or in my car. I can't imagine carrying the Oly and a bagful of lenses all of the places I go with my Panasonics. The sharpness may not equal the Oly, but with a touch of AI, they come close.
For the most part I use Topaz AI Clear, which is part of the Topaz Studio plug-in. I find it much faster than Denoise AI or Sharpen AI. It both removes noise at three levels AND sharpens at the same time.
If I have to crop to a small portion of the image, I use On1 Resize rather than Gigapixel, as it is faster and gives more choices for size. The results from these products give quite acceptable results in terms of noise and definition.
By the way, I think the current mania for sharpness is overdone. You can examine an image at 100 or 200 percent looking for noise or lack of sharpness, but if you print the image at a reasonable size, such as 16 x 12 inches, you will never notice the "faults." A wise person once told me that if you can's see it from two feet, it doesn't exist. What is more important to me is the overall impact of the image.