Output sharpening in InDesign

I don't find any image output sharpening options in InDesign CS5. Don't they exists or is there another workflow? In the past I was told to resize and sharpen images in Photoshop before I place them in InDesign. Unfortunatley this is a very cumbersome process, especially when the image size is not fixed in the design, but will depend on the amount of content. If you resize and crop the image in InDesign (where I also have the context around the picture) it is almost impossible to recreate the exact image in Photoshop. I would have expected that InDesign has an option to output sharpen the images, but I can't find any. I checked the help, the forum and googled. I might use the wrong keywords, but I didn't find any usefull information. Especially after a lot of sharpening workflow made it in to other programms like Lightroom, I would have expected to have such a basic funtion where it is especially needed. By coincident I found link optimizer (http://www.zevrix.com/linkoptimizer.php), which is just the perfect solution, but it seems to be available only for the MAC and not for Windows.
Does anybody has any proper and sufficient workflows?
Marcus

A few observations from an Adobe perspective ...
Sharpening is a technique applied to raster images to boost apparent sharpness. The fact is that the best way to “sharpen” a photographic image is to properly focus the camera's lens prior to shooting! The sharpening available in Photoshop and other raster image processing programs simply stated tries to boost apparent sharpness by artifically enhancing what looks like object “edges” in the image files.
Sharpening is image specific. Some images require no sharpening, many benefit from minor sharpening. And of the images that require any significant sharpening, that sharpening is often best applied selectively within the image such as to accentuate a person's face and/or fuzz out an overly busy and sharp background (effectively reducing depth of field). As you may know, Photoshop provides a number of methods of and options within such methods for image sharpening.
The actual sharpening process is in fact dependent on the resolution of the original raster image as well as the apparent resolution of the image when rendered either on screen or to plate or paper. That apparent resolution is the resolution after any image resampling (either downsampling or upsampling also known as image interpolation) performed by the on-screen renderer or the RIP (for printing). Such image resampling can either effectively erase or exaggerate the results of sharpening done earlier in the workflow. In the latter case, those exaggerated results appear as unexpected ridges and/or light lines in the output.
InDesign is primarily a layout program with significant support for entry and editing of text and vector objects. Support for raster images is primarily for placement within the document, sizing (including magnification and cropping), rotation, and participation in some special effects available also to text and vector object, in other words operations on raster images associated with the use of such raster images in the context of the publication being produced in InDesign.
We get enough complaints about the complexity of InDesign as is. Trying to integrate a full Phoshop-like image editor into InDesign would be way over the edge. Furthermore, in most publication workflows, raster images and similar artwork are typically not embedded in any publication file itself, but referenced by links by all publications that use such raster images and artwork.
Ideally, Photoshop would be used for specifying qualitatively what within an image is to be sharpened, to what degree, and possibly with what method and allow some preview of what the results of that specified sharpening would look like when rendered at a particular magnification. Such sharpening parameters would accompany the image as metadata through InDesign to the exported PDF file and would only be acted upon (i.e., the actual sharpening of the raster bitmap based upon the sharpening parameters) by the renderer or RIP when either the PDF file is viewed at a particular magnification or printed at a particular resolution.
The problem is that the ideal sharpening workflow is not currently implemented by anyone. It makes little sense to try to hack something onto PDF export capability of InDesign to do sharpening when in fact the target display magnifications and/or printing resolution is not yet definitively known. Furthermore, since such sharpening parameters would likely differ from image to image per (2) above, doing a global sharpening of all images with a single set of parameters makes no sense at all.
This subject is very interesting and complex. The OP, FastFeet, does bring up some important points. Unfortunately, a reasonable solution requires “fixes” and new features in the image editing and the rendering aspects of the workflow, not in InDesign, the layout vehicle.
          - Dov

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