Sharpening strategy for web

As you probably know most (if not all) digital images can benefit from a good bit of sharpening,
now there are several ways that you can accomplish this by using the sharpening tools in photoshop.
However I’m only going to show you my favorite way to sharpen an image for web purposes.
This is a fairly easy and straight forward approach but it grants very good results!
Do keep in mind that sharpening should be your final step before saving the image and after all color
and contrast adjustments have been made!

First thing you’ll have to do is to figure out at what size you want your final image,
then add 25% of the size of the longest side to that number.  
So for example if I wanted my final image to be 1000px on the longest side,
then I would add 25% which is 250, this would then give me 1250px.

Now we’ll resize (found under Image > Image Size)our image to the size that was calculated,
just make sure that you leave the Constrain Proportions checkbox on so that you only have to
type in the longest side.

The Image Size window and the image after it has been resized

Then we will sharpen the image with Unsharp Mask (found under Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask)
using these settings:
- Amount: 300%
- Radius: 0,5
- Threshold: 0
And then a second round of sharpening with Unsharp Mask using these settings:
- Amount: 200%
- Radius: 0,6
- Threshold: 0
After this you will end up with a oversharpend/unnatural looking image, don’t worry though this will be fixed next.

The Unsharp Mask windows


The image after the sharpening was applied

Then you will want to fade this last Unsharp Mask filter by 50% in Luminosity mode.
(found under Edit > Fade Unsharp Mask )

The Fade window

Now it is time for the final resizing to the size you had originally in mind, in my case this was 1000px.
You will end up with an image that is sharp, crisp, has no haloes and is ready to use for web purposes.

The Image Resize window and the final image (rollover to see a before)

If you regularly resize and sharpen images for web then i have made this action set for you, it includes resizing and sharpening images to 1000px, 750px, 500px, 250px and it also contains a generic action where you can dial in the numbers yourself. Download here!