Photoshop offers a few methods of sharpening images under the filter drop-down menu but there is a better way to sharpen your images. Photoshops high pass filter can be used to sharpen your photographs and bring out the fine details in the image.
To start, open an image in Photoshop that you would like to sharpen. Duplicate the background layer and with the duplicated layer selected go to Filters->Other->High Pass. What you set the radius to will depend on the image. The smaller the radius the finer the sharpening will be. It will be almost impossible to judge this from the preview since it will appear as an all gray image. This part takes some practice and experimenting but in general for a full size image from your 10-15mp digital camera you’ll want to set the radius to around 1 or 2. For a web sized images I usually set the radius to about 0.5.
The next step is to set this layer to overlay. Zoom into 100 percent and turn on and off the layer and you should be able to see the difference in sharpening. You can also create multiple layers with different amounts of sharpening. For example, you could have one layer at 0.5 for very fine details, another layer at 1 for the normal details, and a final layer at 2 for more broad sharpening. Lowering the opacity of the layer can also be useful if the final result looks a bit too crunchy. There really is no single solution that will fit every image so it requires some experimenting to figure out how to get the best sharpening your images and each image will vary a bit.
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