Sharpening within seconds!

[Carlj]

I rarely use USM for sharpening these days - needing to watch for the haloes.

Method I use is this.

Duplicate layer, high pass filter, about 5 pixels. Set blending mode to soft light (can use overlay or hard light) and reduce to between 75 and 80%. Flatten and save.

[guest4]

I do pretty much the same thing although for an 8-10MP image I tend to use a radius of 2-2.5 pixels and usually don't reduce the opacity, although I do sometimes.

I find that overlay blending mode is best for accuracy, followed by hard light but you can get some nice effects using vivid light, makes the pic a little more 'spangly'.