Sharpen My Image?

Click on the Detail icon (it's the third one from the left) beneath the histogram and, at the top of the panel, you’ll find the Sharpening controls. The Amount slider controls the amount of sharpening (please forgive me for explaining what this slider does). The Radius slider determines how many pixels out from an edge the sharpening will affect, and I usually leave this set at 1.0. If I run into an image that needs to be super-sharp, I’ll occasionally move it up to 1.2, or even as high as 1.3, but that’s about as high I’ll go. The next slider down is Detail. I recommend leaving this set as-is (I’m not usually a fan of default settings, but this one is actually good). This slider, set where it is, allows you to apply a higher amount of sharpening without seeing a halo around the edges of objects in your image (a typical side effect of too much sharpening), so it’s an improvement over Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask filter. If you want sharpening that looks more like the Unsharp Mask, then raise this slider to 100 and it’s pretty much the same (you can expect to see halos fast if you set the Amount slider too high). Last is the Masking slider. I only use this when sharpening objects where I don’t want the entire image sharpened equally—I just want the edges sharpened. For example, if I’m sharpening a portrait of a woman, I want to sharpen her eyes, eyebrows, teeth, lips, etc., but avoid sharpening her skin because it brings out texture we don’t want to enhance (we want to keep it smooth). By raising the Masking amount, it narrows the sharpening to just the edges. Press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key as you drag the slider to see what it’s affecting. Areas that turn black (as seen in the inset above) are not being sharpened—only the white areas get sharpened.