When to Sharpen

If I am planning to edit a photo in Photoshop, when should I use LR sharpening, before going to PS or after? Why?
Since the Sharpening in LR is referred to as "Capture Sharpening" should it be skipped for photos that are going to be printed and all sharpening done in PS as the final step?
In his LR 1.1 Update p. 464, Martin Evening states that over sharpening can lead to "all sorts of problems" at the retouching stage in PS. How much it too much sharpening?
Thank you.

There is an easy answer and that is to stick close to the two sharpening presets provided in the Develop module. Start by selecting either the portrait or landscape setting and if you wish to vary the settings, stick close to the values used in the presets. That way you can avoid over-sharpening.
Yes, all 'raw' images will benfit from some sharpening and you should view capture sharpening as a required preliminary stage for all raw files before you render them in Photoshop and do any retouching or even if you don't use Photoshop and go straight to print. At the print stage a more aggressive sharpening is required to compensate for the loss of sharpness in the translation from pixels to dots on paper that make up a viewed print at a standard viewing distance.
Capture sharpening is used to address the inherrent softness in a raw capture photo and make the image sharp enough to look good on screen without generating halos or artifacts. The point about not over-sharpening is that you don't want to apply heavy output sharpening before you start retouching an image. If there are artifacts in an image at this stage then you may end up cloning these on top of more artifacts and compound the problem.
Bruce Fraser first advocated the multi-pass sharpening approach and spent a lot of research time working out the Photoshop sharpening routines for various types of source images and image content types (i.e. portrait type or fine detail landcape type images) and devised action routines for Photoshop that will apply just the right amount of pre-sharpening. But it took him a lot of hours to work out this and the output sharpening settings! Lightroom/ACR 4.1 does make it easier because the slider settings allow you to interactively set the settings using your eyes to judge what looks best. So although it would still take quite a bit of time to come up with settings as good as the ones Bruce created for Photokit Sharpener, that task is made easier now. But as I say, if you are unsure of how to adjust all the sharpening sliders in the detail panel, try to stick to the presets.
Martin

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