Tired of the way that the sharpening filter puts all the little funny chunkies in you images? A handy trick for sharpening edges in an image without getting lots of little jaggy bits all over the place is to use photoshop's high-pass filter. This is best suited to pulling edges that are not too fuzzy or distorted, and only has a strong effect on clearly defined edges.

First, you open you image and duplicate the background layer; this new layer is where you will be applying the filter.

 From the top menu select Filter->Other->High Pass

Adjust the radius to where you can barely see the edges defined in the gray, if you see color it is defenitely WAY too high. Just above or below one is typically a good setting. In the case above and below I have set it to where the lines are very obvious for illustrative purposes. Usually I would shoot for the edges being far less defined in the gray. That said sometimes the 1.2 that it is set to in the figure above is a good setting for actual use, just not so much in this case. Also, something to keep in mind is that often the edges in the preview look stronger than they will when applied to the whole image.

Depending on how the layer looks you may want to undo and rerun the high pass filter with a different radius. For the final images I used a radius of 0.6.

Now set the blending of the filtered layer to "Overlay" and adjust the opacity as needed, but often it is not neccessary.  

 I hope you find this useful.

-Joe