If you’re a regular Photoshop user, chances are that you’ve played around with the Unsharp Mask filter (Filters >Sharpen > Unsharp Mask…). It’s a handy way to give your photograph a smoother, cleaner look, especially if it has been softened as a result of having other filters applied to it.
However, there may be times when using the Unsharp Mask filter doesn’t produce satisfactory results — with larger images or noisy images, for example. In this article, I’ll walk you through a sequence of steps that will give you more control over the Unsharp Mask filter and the areas of an image that you apply it to.
The PSD file I’ve used in this article is available as a downloadable zip archive (7.5MB), if you’d like to play along at home.

The original image that needs sharpening up!
As you can see, it’s a nice picture, but it’s lost some of its crispness. We’ll bring that back with this series of steps.

Following are the steps to Sharpen the Image using Photoshop

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