@Janne - Many thanks for sharing the workflow tips- very much appreciated!
@Morgan_Hardwood - Yes, I see that. What a difference! I did the same test - resized in Gimp (nohalo) and in RT. And resizing in RT is far, far better… Kind of annoying to have to swap to RT to downscale but proof’s int pudding, as they say!
I’ll not bring my two cents about sharpening, but:
Why show reduced images instead of crops in a discussion about sharpening?
I looked only at the “original” image. It is good, but this is a terribly overprocessed JPEG with typical blurred areas in the darkest parts of the foliage, like in a photo from a point and shoot or an iPhone. The JPEG processor of the camera blurs the image to reduce the noise, then it sharpens it back (?): all this is done automatically, and most of the time badly.
The first thing, if you definitely prefer to shoot JPEG, and if it is possible on your camera, is to neutralize all these uncontrolled “improvements” (denoising, sharpening) of your images by a brainless machine.
Despite that, I often use such images, as I always carry a tiny point and shoot (a cheap Sony DSC-WX350 without raw output) in my pocket. I noticed that this sort of overprocessed JPEG don’t require the same detail enhancement as good raw pictures taken according to the best practices. For instance, filters like G’mic’s “Mighty details” can bring back some (fake) depth to the foliage shadows.
@Francois_C - Many thanks for the input. The reason I posted a reduced image was that I was trying to figure out how much sharpening needed to be applied to a downscaled image. And what I discovered was that my original image had been over-sharpened by DPP. Once I turned that off, those artefacts went away and I then was off to the races, as they say.