Foreword: As always, you should first crop your picture to the desired aspect, then resize for the CTF Challenge (see the Resizing Tutorial) and then try your sharpening. Sharpening always look better if you keep in mind the media you're sharpening for. These are designed for web viewing. I've compiled a few simple methods for sharpening your images for Web viewing. The methods aren't mine, but collected from different articles found on the web. The goal of all these methods is to enhance the perception of the edges without producing the unsightly halos that frecuently appear after careless sharpening, and without enhancing the noise. Keep in mind that not all methods look good on all images, you may want to experiment with them to see which suits you. The steps work both in Photoshop CS and Photoshop Elements 2.0 (I haven't tried previous versions of these softwares). The beauty of these methods is that they all work on a duplicate layer, so the changes are adjustable or even reversible. So let's get our hands wet in the digital darkroom... Method 1: Soft Light Sharpening Open the image you want to sharpen. Duplicate the background layer Rename the duplicate layer to "Soft Light Sharpen" Set this layer to "soft light". This can be accomplished in several ways, one of them is using the drop down menu that each layer has. (Hint: The default is "Normal"). Here you will already notice an improvement, both in sharpening and in overall "pop". You may want to stop here or go to the next step. Now, with the "Soft Light Sharpen" layer still selected, go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and in the resulting popup window put these values: Amount: 400%, Radius: 0.7, Threshold: 0. Press OK. You're done. Now you have two layers, the original background and the "Soft Light Sharpen" layer. If you think it is oversharpened, you can adjust the layer opacity to vary the results. Save your image as PSD or TIFF, so you can go back to it at a later time if something goes wrong or you want to add other effects. Method 2: High Pass Sharpening Open the image you want to sharpen. Duplicate the background layer Rename the duplicate layer to "High Pass Sharpen" Set this layer to either "Soft light" or "Hard light" (I prefer soft, but it's a personal thing) Now, go to Filter > Other > High Pass. Use Radius: 10.0 You're done. No Unsharp mask needed. As with all these filters, you can adjust the opacity to tweak the results. Save your image as PSD or TIFF, so you can go back to it at a later time if something goes wrong or you want to add other effects. Method 3: Luminosity Unsharp Mask This method sharpens only the luminosity information that your picture has. This is to make the picture seem sharper but without sharpening the color information. Thus, this tries to prevent excesive color noise in large colored areas. Open the image you want to sharpen. Duplicate the background layer Rename the duplicate layer to "Luminosity Sharpen" Set this layer to "Luminosity" Now, with the "Luminosity" layer still selected, go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and in the resulting popup window put these values: Amount: 200%, Radius: 0.7, Threshold: 0. Press OK. You're done. Now you have two layers, the original background and the "Luminosity" layer. If you think it is oversharpened, you can adjust the layer opacity to vary the results. Save your image as PSD or TIFF, so you can go back to it at a later time if something goes wrong or you want to add other effects. To make it even easier, I have compiled 5 actions which use this methods. They work with Photoshop CS. I don't know how to make them work with Elements. You can find them here. A simpler way to sharpen is of course to just do an Unsharp Mask (as described in two of the methods) on the original layer, but that introduces halos, artifacts in areas where we don't want sharpening (such as the sky). And it is also irreversible. I hope this brief sharpening article gives some help. Best to all, Nugar http://www.nugar.com/gallery/