Too much resizing for capture sharpening?

Question

For images that will be offset printed 2.25" wide by various lesser heights, is there a disadvantage to shooting large raw captures? At first I wanted to keep a large original 3008 x 2000 ppi as a master in case we wanted a larger print. But I'm not sure if exposure and other develop settings are degraded when image is resized too much. Would capture sharpening be less effective if image is reduced so much? I'm trying to test whether I should set a smaller file size when shooting, or hold certain develop settings till after resizing.
Thank you,
Tim

Answer 1

Tim, I think that Stu may have misunderstood your potential workaround. If I understand correctly, your plan was to:
1. capture sharpen in LR
2. export from LR at the new size
3. re-import the newly resized version into LR
4. Use the sharpening tools on the resized version to output sharpen
5. Export the output sharpened resized image at "full-size" (i.e. no further resizing on export)
And your question was "if both LR and PS are being used to sharpen the same re-sized image, what can PS do that LR cannot," right?
Well, I have also been experimenting with this workaround and have found it to be satisfactory for many images. From what I can tell, USM in Photoshop is different in at least these potentially significant ways:
1. PS has Threshold which, from what I can tell, works differently than Detail. You should play with each to get a feel for when it might be advantageous to use each. I have found threshold to be most useful for keeping PS from applying sharpening to fine-grain noise in the image. However, most fine-grain noise will be "averaged out" when downsizing, so this might not be an important difference.
2. PS can apply a much greater amount of sharpening. Your need for huge amounts of sharpening will depend on the image.
3. PS can use radii less than 0.5, which can be very useful for small thumbnail-size images.