sharpening tutorial (photoshop)

I've been wanting to do before/after tutorials for a long time. I thought i'd start out slow, and demonstrate a better way to sharpen your photos, using this photo of my lovely friend Natalie here.

Here is the starting photo (after being edited but not sharpened)

First, duplicate your layer. (you can right click your layer in the layer palette and click "duplicate layer" for this. Now you'll have two layers exactly the same.

Next, go to the top bar, and click Filter, Other, High Pass, and adjust the settings till it looks somewhat like this:

Then set the blending mode (top left of the layers palette) to Overlay, or Soft Light, and adjust it however looks best.

And here it is sharpened!

A closer look at the before and after:

And thats it! This was edited in cs5.1, but works for most previous versions, i think.

If you liked this tutorial and would like to see more, please comment! Thanks!