Downsizing & sharpening: "while and/or after"?

[Marsu42]

I hope you people can help me with a problem that has been bugging me for years. I have been asking around in various photography forums to no real avail, probably the differences aren't that huge so many photogs don't really care ... but still. Do note that I tried to rtfm, but the information concerning these matters is too overwhelming for simple /me.

I'm exporting my pictures from Lightroom for processing with IM (watermarking, annotations, tagging, resizing and sharpening). The last two steps are the problem: Do I sharpen *while* downsizing* or *after* or a combination of both?

By now I know that sharpening in consecutive steps is a good idea, a slight pixel-level sharpening in LR while the raw data is still accessible is a good idea to counter the effect of the aliasing filter in front of the sensor. But afterwards, I can either apply an aggressive sharpening-downsizing filter (like Cosine or Ginseng) and leave it at that, or downsize regularly (like Lanczosradius -define filter:blur=0.9891028367558475 or maybe -define filter:blur=0.88549061701764) and then do an adaptive sharpening, or a combination of both.

I imagine that because the downsizing step has access to more pixel data, it could do a better job at sharpening? But then again the absolutely very best sharpening filter bar none (Smart Sharpen in Photoshop 2014) has just access to the downsized data and leaves everything in the dust - that's because it can tell between lens bokeh and subject and only sharpen the latter.

What do you guys think, what's the smart way to do it for regular photography w/o tuning the parameters individually for each and every picture?

[snibgo]

In my limited experiments (see http://im.snibgo.com/resamphm.htm), I find that "downsize with sharpen" is better than downsizing, then sharpening.