Selective Sharpening

A lot of people overlook the sharpening in Camera Raw. You can move the mask slider up around 85-95 to sharpen primarily line edges and leave everything else unsharpened. This works well when shooting high ISOs where you don't want to bring more attention to grain noise.

RandMan wrote in post #14946451
Correct, but with one click it can merge all visible layers, change the new layer to Luminosity Blending Mode, Run an Unsharp Mask, and go to the "Blend If" parameters and set them to avoid sharpening the shadows and highlights. And then you can start tweaking for the particular image without going through all the rudamentary motions at first.

OK, but surely in that case it saves no time or effort? I certainly don't think of sharpening as a major part (time wise) of post processing, instead its the final "polish" after already buffing it to a high shine.

ok so here is something I whipped up to give an idea of what I was talking about. of course the action is not set to do anything constructive just for demo purposes only. the one I have using now include smart object and changing filter settings to taste, opacity, and mask changes . of course it has tons buttons but it works for what I do.

but you get the idea.