Photoshop includes some amazing tools for Sharpening, most of which are pretty obvious like Sharpen and Sharpen More. There are more ways to sharpen like Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen, but one of my favorites is not so easily found, as it doesn't even have Sharpen in its name. I'm talking about High Pass Filter and this is a trick I learned from the "Photoshop Guys". If you don't know who I'm talking about you must be from another planet, but for the sake of clarity, the Photoshop Guys are Scott Kelby, Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowsky from Photoshop TV or Kelby Media and they have some great, short tutorials for Photoshop tricks that I encourage all to check out.
To learn the tip, select "Read More"
Anyway, the High Pass filter tip goes like this. Start with an image, a photo is best, duplicate the image, so that you now have two identical layers. An easy shortcut for doing this is Command K or Control K for PC. Now, with the top layer selected, go to Filter > Other > High Pass. You'll get some weird grey looking image that seems to be focused on edges and that's what you want. Play around with the setting slider kind of intuitively, not too much, not too little, until you think you've got it just right. (Don't worry, you can always start over.) Then select a Blend Mode that works best for your image. In my case, it's Overlay, but in some cases, it could be Multiply or others - experiment!
In most cases, I find this form of sharpening to be better than others and keep in mind that since this is happening on a separate layer, you can back off the Opacity if the effect is too strong.
