Thought some of you who haven't tried it might like a sample of Details. I tried to find a challenging shot to sharpen up - so I went to my safari shots of the male lion. At 345mm, from a moving truck, and ISO400 and a megazoom lens wide open, it was certainly one that was sharpness-challenged. After initial processing, and applying my basic USM to the resized shot, this was about as good as I could get without sharpening halos:
I was OK with it, because there was hair detail in the mane, and some facial scar details. It was far from perfect, but the lions are hard to get on that ride.
So I took the original shot (notice it isn't cropped in as close as the above shot), and ran it quick and dirty through details using the microcontrast setting with the small details slider pumped up a bit:
Now...just to point out, I've done no other processing here. With some noise reduction in the background, or layering over the original, the background could be suitably smoothed down a bit, but still leaving the detail on the lion. But the details in the lion really do jump out a lot more, and despite cranking up the sliders high on a slightly blurry shot, it didn't produce typical sharpening white haloes around the edges.
Here's another - this original shot was fairly sharp, and I didn't process it at all other than resizing and light USM:
Now this is actually a different photograph, but taken at almost the same time, from the same spot, of the same gorilla, in the same light - for all effects and purposes, it should be the same basic shot for details. This is the version that I did no processing on other than running through Details on microcontrast setting:
It does bring out much more detail in the fine hairs.
Now, I need to fine tune using it - I may go for a blend, as sometimes the adjustments make the shots a bit too contrasty - I need to work the sliders to pull that down a bit. I'm only just playing with it this week, so I'm pretty new to Details. But so far, it does seem to have a few abilities that go beyond what Adjust alone was doing.