Olympus Viewer 2 software - a question about sharpening

<p>Greetings. I 'd like to get some advice from Olympus Viewer 2 software users regarding your sharpness procedures and settings.<br>

When I double click a RAW or JPEG photo in the Browse window and it opens in the Image Edit screen, the right side of the screen shows an "Edit" tab as well as a "Raw" tab adjacent to it. Now within the "Edit" tab, there is a "Sharpness & Blur" feature, and below it is an "Unsharp Mask" feature. The adjacent "Raw" tab has its own "Sharpness" adjustment feature.<br>

Given these options, what do you do to add some sharpness to an JPEG image, as well as a RAW image? Do you utilize all of these choices, or some combination? This is quite confusing, and not explained to any extent in Viewer 2's on-line help.<br>

Also, considering the "Unsharp Mask" feature, what rule-of-thumb settings do you recommend for the Strength, Radius and Threshold sliders?<br>

Thanks for any and all comments.</p>

<p>There may be some madness in my method. I shoot in RAW and develop to TIFF. I don't sharpen when developing a RAW into a TIFF. It took me a while to find the Unsharp Mask feature and once I did I abandned using Sharpness and Blurr. I use Unsharp Mask always, set Threshold to 5, Radius to 1 and then adjust Strength to taste, where 75 - 85 I use for an image where the focus was already sharp, landscape I goose up to around 125, and whenI have an image where focus is bad anyway and my purpose is to merely ID an out of focus bird, I push the strength way up regardless of how oversharpened the resulting image looks since those type of shots aren't keepers or for dislay. All that to output for viewing on screen. I don't print much and probably would have to tweak the Threshold, Radius and strength if printing? The reason I don't sharpen when developing RAW into TIFF is that I read somewhere it is best not to. Perhaps sharpening twice degrades the image. The documentation isn't great to say the least, and why Unsharp Mast is the name of the feature that adds sharpness is beyond me. Looking forward to a Guru to clear up my confusion too.</p>

<p>I too export tiffs and sharpen at the end of editing those. And the unsharp mask is so called because the historical method of sharpening from film included making a (genuinely) unsharp copy or mask of the image as part of the process (or so I'm told).</p>