I was playing with a MGS image of Noctis Labirinthus, one of most intriguing regions of Mars in my opinion (original image here).
Original image appear poor both in terms of dinamic range and details, especially in the center region (the richiest one); so I decided to apply an heavy sharpening ("contour enhancement" in Paint Shop Pro) + automatic bightness/contrast adjust.
I cannot believe to the quality of final result, compared to original one... now you can clearly see dunes fields, stratigraphy and terrain pavimentation!
Click to view attachment
Information that can be made visible from some "bad" images is really impressive, but obviously the original images aren't so bad, because they already contains those details!
I already had similar experience with the Nico's moon image published some time ago in this Forum... I would like to know other experience from others.

This looks great, good work!

Similar results on the false-color Moon image from MRO, even if original was a jpeg (I had to partially remove artifacts before sharpening)... it looks very promising!

Looking good dilo!

I've enjoyed PS' unsharp masking a lot for printing photographs.

It's a little troublesome for online sharing though since sharpening alters the dark/light pixel edges and adjusting image size after USM can cause undesired artifacts.
Therefore I usually don't apply it for online work so the user has maximum freedom to downsize, print, or just apply the amount of USM that suits her/him.

A lot of cameras apply in-camera sharpening and that causes severe limitations to further processing.
You can also get better results if you use duplicate layers and play with the transparency.

When the original photograph is good, USM can do wonders!

Nico

I often spend a lot of time browsing MGS scenes, and this one is a perfect example.

I can just imagine the awesome vistas for photogrpahy that must exist on this planet; the mesas, the spires, the long narrow canyons. For anyone who loves the American Southwest, I suspect that there exist scenes to dwarf Monument Valley and Escalante Canyon.

People some day are going to go on amazing recreational hiking tours. Alas, it won't be us.

oops..ignore this!

But we could send a MER-3 here... I would pay for it! (ehm, not only me, but we can start to collect money guys... )
Anyway, Nico, your approach to preserve original images leaving user free to manipulate is rigorous but temptation to give more readable images to the Forum readers is strong, especially when you discover how much information is hidden in it!
Anyway, about digital cameras, remember that in addition to USM filter they need to make some interpolation work in order to fill the limits of usual Bayer filters they use... in other words, is impossible to have rigorous output from a single-sensor camera for consumer market!

Nico, forgot to ask you more about multiple layers technique...
Do you sum/average different versions with different sharpening? Can you give more details?