Higher printer sharpen setting

Question

What I always found is that, even after a good custom capture sharpening under LR, with High sharpen setting I get too soft results.
Maybe it's just a matter of taste, maybe it's that I don't see well (or too well?).
Most probably it's that I almost always print on baryta paper (which is softer than ultra-super-hyper-premium-glossy) or on glossy papers but for very small formats.
Anyway... the Sharpen setting should be a bunch of parameters for the algorithm Jeff Schewe and others worked onto, could you just create another option for more visibile effect?
Once Scott Kelby said (speaking about this matter): "Low means nothing, Medium means Low and High mean Medium".
I certainly agree.

Answer 1

Actually I have to qualify my statement. Andrew and I are talking about different things. I was mostly talking about how the sharpening interacts with the upscaling. If you keep the physical size of the print constant, it appears that the halo is of constant physical size (i.e. a certain fraction of a mm) of the paper. There is however a strong effect of softening of the image if you upscale. Here is the effect illustrated (you might have to click to see 1:1. These went through a printer profile (for fine art paper on our HP Z5200) sent to pdf instead of to the printer, opened in PS CS5 (extracting the exact image as it is sent to the printer from it) and were converted to sRGB for display here.
Native resolution (about 240 ppi for the 12x18 size I selected) high glossy sharpening
360 ppi high glossy sharpeneing: (I know the HP needs 300 instead of 360 but I used 360 here since that was used in the discussion)
720 ppi high glossy
So the size of the halo appears physically the same regardless of the resolution setting, but it appears that the upscaled images lose some directness/contrast. The black of the branches is toned down even though if you look carefully you do see more detail in the upscaled versions. So the question is how this interacts with the printer driver and the printing process. One really has to check the final prints. My approach has been to ask casual observers which they prefer and it tends to be not what I expected. They often like the non-upscaled ones as I think the loss of small scale contrast because the blurring inherent to the upscaling counteracts the sharpening and results in something more detailed but less "punchy". This is quite subjective though. I have noticed that non-photographers tend to favor the suggestion of detail instead of the actual presence of detail.
Secondly, if you keep the resolution constant but vary the print size, it is pretty clear that the physical size of the sharpening haloes is determined by the size of the print and not by the resolution setting in that case. For example, if you print a file at 240 ppi at 12x18 and compare to the same image printed at 240 ppi, 24x36, the halo in the second is twice as large physically, so it is an optical calculation that takes into account viewing distance being larger when you print bigger. This of course makes perfect sense. Lastly, If you do not check the resolution checkbox, the image that is sent to the printer for a 12x18 print is bit-for-bit identical to the image sent for a 24x36 print consistent with the previous observation.
Hope this helps.