Camera setting question...

[sharky60]

...I don't know if it makes a difference between point-n-shoot or DSLR's, but my camera (point-n-shoot) has a sharpness setting with 3 choices,
1. normal
2. sharp
3.soft

...I get soft and of course normal, but the question is, Is there an advantage underwater to shooting in the "sharp" mode?

Seems like it was covered with me when I bought the camera, but I can't remember the reasoning why to just leave the camera on "normal".

 

[ce4jesus]

Here's a nice, confusing answer. Depends on the camera. DPReview usually breaks down how the camera processes the Jpeg and will usually give you an opinion on settings like sharpness. I normally sharpen photos I like afterward in Photoshop. That way I can sharpen only the objects I want sharpened. The thing to do is to take 3 pictures of the same object, a brick wall works nice, with all 3 sharpness settings. Find which one you like best, set it and forget it.

 

[stiebs]

As a general rule, provided you're downloading photos to your computer and not making prints directly from the card, you want to keep the in-camera processing to a minimum, and do it on the computer. Without knowing your camera, I would hazard a guess that "normal" does little processing, "soft" applies a softening filter, "sharp" applies a sharpening filter.
If you use the "unsharp mask" filter in photoshop (or similar) you'll have much more control over exactly how sharp you want the image.