Tried them all. They looked the same sadly.
Like a dog with a bone, I grabbed another image and tried that. This is quite low contrast because it's straight off the scanner, no touch ups.
(Also for anyone looking at these and thinking they look blurry, the forum image presentation blurs everything with some compression. The Topaz text on the screenshots above illustrate this)
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5600 x 4600 MF Scan. Dusty (foreground cat) with Crow behind him OOF because of DoF. Pulled this into the program because it has both a sharp and blurred subject.
Crow (black cat) was blurry no matter what I tried.
Zooming in on Dusty which is "acceptably sharp" already, Topaz does nothing on the "Sharpen" tab. It's the sort of image I'd do very little with in LR (sharpness wise). If I switch mode to Stabilize, it starts to clean up the hairs on him.
(Original on left for all images)
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This is at a detail level that's very cool, but I'd never see on print, and leads me to believe that the sharpening radius is quite low at a pixel level. Lightroom has the ability to adjust the pixel granularity of the sharpening with its radius slider (so I can apply a bigger radius to larger pixel images to get eh same effect). I can't find anything like that here. I wonder if it's set, or whether the "AI" makes a decision on it? If it's an AI decision, then the detail level is too low for me to see at anything other than 100% crops on a computer, or mahoosive prints. I wonder if it's also designed for people who crop heavily?
His face though is another matter...
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It's added significant noise (even with "Noise Suppression" slider high, and "Extra Noise Suppression" ticked). Again - it
has increased the sharpness, but at unacceptable cost. Admittedly I might be able to get rid of it or lessen it with NR but that will also damage any grain in the image.
Thanks for all the replies folks. It gives me confidence that I've not missed something stupid. The auto-mask function and radius slider in LR are still the most efficient way for me to sharpen images.
I think I remember somewhere, could have been Scott Kelby, that LRs sharpen tool is lifted straight from Photoshop using that technology. As soon as I heard that, I stopped using High Pass sharpening and switched to LR. Once I got my head round how it worked, I got better results (and much quicker without the switch to another app)