Camera Raw's sharpening capabilities have improved greatly in the last couple of versions of the plug-in (starting with Camera Raw 4.1, which was released after Photoshop CS3), and its controls now rival the sharpening you can produce in Photoshop. Sharpening in Camera Raw even affects your image's luminosity (lightness or brightness values) and leaves the color alone.

But should you use Camera Raw for sharpening? The answer is yes—if you're not going to edit the image much in Photoshop. If you are going to do a lot of editing in Photoshop, you should save the sharpening for your very last step (after retouching and resizing) and use one of the methods described earlier in this chapter instead.