Should you sharpen images before laying them out in the design, or should you sharpen the overall layout? It appears that sharpening the whole layout makes the smaller images look funny, does it make the most sense to sharpen before sizing them in the album?

I think so. Sharpen before.

There was a topic a while back about this. Dustin Francis (The Sharpening Guru) runs an unsharp mask on the entire spread before printing to maintain consistency. Makes sense, so I employed the technique into my workflow.

resurrecting this one has i'm trying to finish up a sample album for printing. i'm good with sharpening for the web, but for some reason when it comes to print i'm never sure how far to go. what sort of sharpening method do folks prefer, regular usm, or something like an edge sharpening? i guess i struggle with one sharpening method for different sized images, since a bigger image may need more sharpening than a smaller one. i guess i'm pretty much an idiot when it comes to that stuff!

if i provided a spread, would someone want to walk me through their process? it would be good to continue this topic, i think others can definitely benefit

I wouldn't think that sharpening the entire spread would work. Sharpening settings differ with different size images. Why not sharpen before designing?

Well, I imagine the problem with sharpening before designing is that images get resized for the design. Doing it as a last step makes sense but the fact that there isn't a one size fits all solution makes that method a little problematic. I wish the sharpening gurus would find this! lol

The thing with sharpening a spread is if you sharpen images that have a stroke on they go a bit icky (sorry, not a good word to explain what I mean)! If you sharpen a key-lined image you'll find if you look closely that the black key-line suddenly has a faint white line between the image and the key-line - whether that shows up in print, I don't know.