What am I doing wrong with RAW sharpening

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I have never bothered much with shooting RAW because I need the fast burst speed buffering of Jpeg as virtually all my photography is sport related. Playing with RAW + Jpeg recently at a dinner I found I was unable to sharpen the photos as much as I wanted in RAW without getting huge amounts of noise introduced. Granted there weren't the sharpening halos that you could see on the sharpened Jpeg photos when you went in really close (closer than you would ever need) but I was wondering why so much noise is introduced when sharpening the RAW files that is not present on the Jpeg ones and what the trick is to overcome it. Cheers
 
Any examples? I take it you are used to shooting in a more naturally lit environment doing sport.
Try HIGH PASS SHARPENING instead after you've sorted the levels, deleting the areas that are noisy and dont benefit from sharpening.
 
Is there a masking slider anywhere close to the sharpening slider? That limits the extent of the sharpening and does effectively the same as high pass sharpening.
 
The problem may be that they appear noisy compared to your JPEGs because you may have noise reduction added to your JPEGs by your camera, whereas the RAW will have none.

One thing I can be certain off... your camera will not be producing more noise just because it's shooting RAW. Play with a combination of sharpening and NR with your RAW.
 
What ISO did you shoot at?
and with what camera?
 
The photos were shot mostly in a marquee with very poor ambient light levels on ISO 400 with a 7D & 17-55 IS 2.8 EFS USM using a Speedlite 430 with a gary fong collapsible diffuser. On reflection I could probably have got away with much lower ISO given that they were all flash illuminated.
The high pass filter suggestion seems to work well thanks with just a touch of imagenomic noise reduction. I was using 'adjust sharpness' and it was way too noisy. The simultaneous Jpegs were set with standard picture mode which I'm guessing has NR thrown in along with the in-camera sharpening.
Thanks for your suggestions folks
 
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