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From: Contact Sheet, October 1, 2009

Safe Sharpening

To sharpen your image non-destructively, open it and choose Filter > Convert for Smart Filters, then choose Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. Enter the desired settings, press OK, and paint with black inside the Smart Filter mask to hide the sharpening (it's the big white thumbnail below your image in the Layers panel). To keep your colors from shifting, open the filter's Blending Options by clicking the tiny icon to the right of the Unsharp Mask layer. In the resulting dialog box, change the mode to Luminosity. 

Lesa Snider (Evangelesa), founder of GraphicReporter.com, is iStockphoto's Chief Evangelist and the author of Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual.

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