Recently noticed my images weren’t looks as ultra sharp as I wanted them when I’d resized them for web in Photoshop. In fact – it looked to me that the resizing process of Photoshop was loosing a good deal of the sharpness of my shots. So – I began looking into different methods of sharpening.

It seemed to me that resizing from original image size (over 5,000 pixels wide) down to a web size (e.g. 800 pixels) was too great a leap in size and caused a loss in sharpness so I decided to create an extra step in the process and sharpen with each step. So – here’s what I do:

1. Original image, apply an unsharp mask: Amount: 50%, Radius: 1px, Threshold: 0
2. Reize to about half the original size (e.g. 2,500 pixels wide)
3. Unsharp mask again: Amount: 100%, Radius: 0.6px, Threshold:0
4. Resize to final required size (e.g. 800px wide)
5. Unsharp mask: Amount: (as much as you want – go to 400% and pull down until acceptable) Radius: 0.2 pixels, Threshold: 0

I find this method keeps sharpness of the image while resizing and gives a good, sharp image for the web.

Here’s an example using this sharpening:

Ladybird