What is the best workflow for Ultimate Sharpening w PSE 8?

Question

I shoot a lot of flowers close up and also birds. Both have lots of detail, feathers or stamen, so I rely heavily on sharpening. With birds, sometimes they are flying or distant or both which makes it challenging to get the pics sharp. Recently I have learned more about sharpening and now I am suffering from, "The more I know, the more I know I don't know." Also, some of my information is based on rumor and I would really appreciate any advice. How about if I discuss my workflow and ask some questions here and there.
I shoot RAW with a Canon 7D and I almost always downsize my pics to nnnn x 1080 for this conversation, lets assume I always do this downsizing. I've heard that downsized pics should never be sharpened until after they are downsized. Is this true? Should I set all of the ACR sharpening sliders to zero? Should I also keep the Clarity slider low in ACR or is it more mid-tone contrast and less sharpening? Is there another way to improve Clarity in PSE, not ACR?
When I am done with ACR and open in Elements, the first thing I do is crop and resize using Image, Resize, Bicubic Sharper. Then I fix blemishes. Next I select out the subject(s) and adjust with Color Curves and then Luminous Sharpening which seems to give me better results than Enhance- Adjust Sharpness. (After two years of using Elements I just found this Luminous sharpening and it is so good. I sure wish I would have notice that in Brundage's book earlier. I makes me wonder what else I am missing.) After the Luminous Sharpening should I try High Pass sharpening additionally or any other kind of sharpening? Are there any rules of thumb on when what type of sharpening works best in which application? For example, I heard another rumor that sharpening highlights or dark shadows just increases noise. Is there a good way to handle those situations, like select them out or use a special blend mode?
After I am done with the subject, I usually inverse to the background and de-noise and/or blurr and desaturate to punch up the subject.
Is full Photoshop required to get the best sharpening tools or is the sharpening similar and other aspects are more powerful? I use so little of Elements 8 that I would assume and hope that Photoshop or Lightroom would be overkill at this point.
Thank you for reviewing this! If you can think of any way I could improve I would really appreciate any comments.
Doug

Answer 1

Hi Barbara,
I am humbled to be communicating with someone who wrote such and incredible book! Ok, enough blathering.
This will also answer Andrewzaye's question about output.
Maybe I shouldn't be resampling but here is my rationale. Most of my best pics I like to show occasionally on my HTDV which has a resolution of 1920x 1080. I resample my pics to get them down to that 1080 vertical resolution so that they will fit the native resolution of the screen. (The sides often don't extend the full 1920 but I don't have a problem with the black space on the sides.) This is based on my believe that images on LCDs look best at the LCDs native resolution (and I like to think I know about this because, as a sales mgr for Toshiba, I used to sell notebook computer LCDs by the tens of thousands to big computer companies.) Sometimes I resample and downsize again to email pics as n x 680. It seems to work fine with decent results but I am certainly open to suggestion.
If I eventually decide to print out a photo, it will be to hang on a wall and for that I save the original CR2 file and the post ACR dng files. If I like something enough to print it, I don't mind editing it again and making sure I am getting it as good as possible. Of course I would keep as much resolution as possible for printing.
Ok, those are my excuses. I would love to hear your thoughts on my sharpening questions.
Doug