what's your way to sharpen your photo in Photoshop?

Guys,
i'm using this method, (learn about this trick in POTN few years back)
Duplicating the layer first,
then going to filters, others , high pass, set it somewhere between 4 to 9, then changing the layer blending to overlay and decreasing opacity to 40 or 50 ..
sharpens gracefully
just want to ask, what's your way of sharpening your photos.

I use Hi Pass on occasion also, but my main method is to copy the layer, change to "Luminosity Blend" then use Unsharp Mask and adjust as necessary.

My way to sharpen it in Photoshop is to do it in Lightroom instead.

I used to do the Unsharp Mask thing in Photoshop for years. Doing it in Lightroom and can basically do the same thing to all my images in a group at one time, rather than going one by one through PS. I would never want to go back and do that again. It saves hours and hours of time. I only use PS if I need to do something more advanced than what can be done in LR... which lately has been a rare occurrence. LR was some of the best money I every spent for digital photography.

I've only used the high pass filter, but looks like I'm gonna have to give Bilsen's way a go!

This is absolutely my new favorite method, I can do it with my eyes closed. http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=r7JqcC2h5zk

My only trouble is achieving perfect black and white separation.

If you leave any grey areas they become noise, which defeats the purpose of this form of sharpening, which is to sharpen without noise.

It is hard to preserve all of the detail when adjusting for black and white so I will admit I have not perfected this technique by a long shot, which is whats so fun about it.

One thing I can say is that this guy forgets to tell you to deselect the alpha mask after you select the alpha mask and then switch over to the RGB channel, then apply unsharp mask and then delete the alpha mask.

Before this I was a fan of edge sharpening and highpass sharpening but this method beats them all when you put the effort into it, it gets architecture so sharp that the screen will have to process the image into clarity for a second when you scroll.

The Cons:
I wouldn't really call them serious Cons but you must watch out for over doing it, halos appear if you over do this sharpening and you really need to do this by the image rather than following the tutorial.

Also I noticed that this form of sharpening really exaggerates chromatic aberrations but they are easily corrected by light room 4's aggressive chromatic aberration removal abilities.

As I mentioned before, gray areas will become noise so I think the only way to avoid this may be to physically paint the gray areas black or erase them all together from the alpha mask. This does however separate generic processing from an art form, which in my opinion is a good thing.

For web stuff i re size to 900px and use the attached action.

For printing just use unsharp mask.

I'm lazy...Neat Image and Nik D-Fine plug ins

wildcatnzl wrote in post #15354626
For web stuff i re size to 900px and use the attached action.

For printing just use unsharp mask.

what does intelligent sharpen do different from other methods?

Much the same, just does it quickly and you can adjust the lighten and darken layer, if you want to fine tune afterwards.

I just use unsharp mask, have to try some of these other methods

The real reason for high-pass is that you can mask it, so that you can brush out areas you don't want sharpened, such as the boundary between the sky and other objects such as trees and buildings.

For web jpegs, I first blur the image with a 2-3 pixel radius depending on the size, downsize, and then sharpen with USM settings of around 100 amount, 0.7 radius and 1 or 2 threshold. If it's a landscape or anything with sky in it, I duplicate the layer and mask out high-contrast edges.

For print, I really like the results I get from Nik sharpener pro.

convergent wrote in post #15354577
My way to sharpen it in Photoshop is to do it in Lightroom instead.

That only works if you don't intend to do anything else to the image, as you say only if you want to do something advanced in PS, but if you do, save sharpening for the last step. I'm just saying this so that other people don't get the wrong idea and sharpen their images before processing them

Personally, if you are shooting with good equipment, usually with L lenses, and under ideal shooting conditions, a mild raw sharpening is enough for me in DPP software. I only NEED to sharpen my photos in CS5 because I need to run noise reductions on the photos. Otherwise, no sharpening EVER in CS5. Of course, if I didn't exactly nail the focus for some reasons.

If I do need to sharpen my photos in CS5, I just use Smart Sharpening.

TooManyShots wrote in post #15357196
Personally, if you are shooting with good equipment, usually with L lenses, and under ideal shooting conditions, a mild raw sharpening is enough for me in DPP software. I only NEED to sharpen my photos in CS5 because I need to run noise reductions on the photos. Otherwise, no sharpening EVER in CS5. Of course, if I didn't exactly nail the focus for some reasons.

If I do need to sharpen my photos in CS5, I just use Smart Sharpening.

I remember back when I bought my first L lens for my little old 400D, the files were so sharp, I had to find a Raw converter I could forcibly disable sharpening in, which led me to Capture One. If I dragged the slider anywhere past 0 I would get ringing and over-sharpening artifacts. That went away, of course, when I switched to using a 5D2, it can actually take a little bit of sharpening.

When printing, photos need to be intentionally over-sharpened to look good, the moment it starts to look rather disgusting on screen means it'll print just right.

If I need to I use this http://www.earthboundl​ight.com …search=edge+mas​k&bool=and but I am finding that DxO does a pretty good job in most cases

I just use smart sharpen as well mostly. Sometimes I selectively sharpen an area.