Sharpening Images in Photoshop

Just about every photo and image that is to be printed benefits from some degree to sharpening.

Printing isn't a perfect laser precise proposition. You get some degree of blurring when the image is reproduced. To offset this (get it? printing.. offset har!) you want to increae the apparent sharpness of the image so that when its printed and is blurred a bit it will come out perfect.

So thats all well and good...how do we decide how much sharpening do we want to apply? It depends on the output device.

In order of sloppiness/blurring

Inkjet
Color Laser Printer
Film>Plate>Offset Print
Computer to Plate>Offset

So if your outputting your image to a Color laser Printer you wouldn't have to use as much as sharpening as you would for Inkjet.

Ok how do we sharpen the image?
9 times out of 10 Unsharp Mask (FILTER>SHARPEN>UNSHARP MASK) will acheive the goal. I usually keep my Radius set at 1 and my Threshold set to 0 Levels and adjust my Amount to the point that it looks a bit too sharp.

If you find you are getting weird color artifacts after you sharpen your image, try converting the image mode to LAB first and then select the Lightness channel and apply the UnSharp Mask to that channel only.