Sharpening filters - yes or no?

[John_H]

I was wondering if there was any general consensus/theory over the use of sharpening filters as part of a pre-processing workflow. Normally I wouldn't do anything apart from colour calibration, but I was wondering if anyone had any experience/advice of using sharpening filters (ie, in Lightroom) on their raw images before aligning?

I've searched the literature, and a lot of it is too technical, but a mild amount of sharpening (not enough to introduce extra noise) seems to be a part of many people's workflows. I'm nervous about doing anything that might alter the raw image, however.

I am generally talking about close-range photography using macro lenses, though do some room-scale projects as well. Metric accuracy of the final model is the key requirement.

Thanks,

John

[wojtek]

Metashape has enough precision to find points even in a very underexposed image so introducing extra contrast does not seem needed. Filtering images can lead to inconsistency between individual photographs which is obviously not welcome.

In my experience it is best to keep images as RAW as possible.