I think the sharpness of the yucca leaves is ok, but the snow is a little bit blurry. Maybe it is not a matter of sharpness. Is it possible to improve the “look” of the snow with the capture sharpen controls?
Actually it is not important to improve this image, I just want to learn these new sharpening options.
Quality of the image is reduced to jpg 20% to save space.
Did you mean to share a raw file?
In the image you show, I see no details in much of the snow. If there are no details, there’s nothing to sharpen…
The lack of details could be due to AgX brightening or flattening the highlights too much, or you could have them blown out (clipped) in the raw already. Impossible to say from the provided screenshot.
I provided the screenshot, so you can see my settings.
Looks like this is the case, I wanted to get the leaves brighter.
agx on:
and agx off:
You can use the tone equalizer to darken highlights, and then the details will reappear.
It was one of the 1st photos of a series of underexposed snow photos. I forgot to use the tone equalizer a while and used “pivot relative exposure” only. At the moment I am doing more or less “learning of agx”. I have to be careful to use “pivot relative exposure” not too much and use tone equalizer too, which I did later.
I think the solution is to draw the slider in the opposite direction to the right. This produces shadow in the snow. And as a 2nd step the tone quealizer.
“pivot relative exposure” slider
Shock and horror I read the user guide about capture sharpening yesterday 
and this quote from the user guide suggests that capture sharpening is not trying to be a be all and end all sharpening tool but rather to set the path for good additional sharpening as required. I really like capture sharpening and incorporate it into all my edits.
“Capture sharpening is not intended to be used as a general sharpening / local contrast enhancing tool. It should instead be understood as a way to increase micro-contrast in structures with lots of detail, and leads to better results for further processing. Excellent examples would be details of surfaces like wood, brick walls, hair etc.”
There are like half a dozen tools in darktable that do sharpening. The best thing is to activate them all at their most intense settings 
As I understood it the role of CS is to correct or offset loss of resolution/sharpness that results from the demosaic process. So that fits with the description. I suspect people will still crank it up as a “sharpening” tool.
Should I also increase the saturation in every possible module too!? 
Isn’t that what we all do …?
I think I’ll raise a feature request to ship clown_vomit.dtstyle and activate it automatically for all edits, new and existing. Contributions are welcome.
The best term I’ve heard used to describe over-processed images created from an HDR is “clown vomit” (which would also be a great name for a band, by the way).
PIXLS.US - HDR Photography with Free Software (LuminanceHDR)
Not surprised the second band is a brutal death metal band. I’m convinced that it’s requirement to be a brutal/intense metal band if your band name has the word vomit.
It’s now in the manual For xtrans sensors that is somewhat true - they desire for more CS. But otherwise, it’s the sensor and lens mostly.
They will see artefacts if radius or iterations are too large. Stay with the auto-radius and maybe give a little bit more of radius but that’s it.
Did you mean more iterations ?
In fact i meant radius, there is some room for increasing before artefacts occurr. Increase iterations is fine too although for me 8 was always ok.
This is an example where a beginner is lost.
I know it would be a lot work, but sometimes images can explain a lot more than words and it would reduce beginners question.
I suggest to include image examples what an option does. At least for the most important settings.
original image
optimal editing
wrong editing where you see the option and why it is wrong.
If I were you, I’d open an image, adjust the sliders Hanno mentioned, and see if anything ugly shows up if I push them to hard. Then, if I still don’t understand what he means, I’d make screenshots and ask a specific question.
