One must be careful when sharpening to not over do it. There are more debates on the correct way to sharpen a photo in photoshop as they are parrot heads at a Jimmy Buffet concert. If I read your post correctly your sharpen and unsharp mask. Never use sharpen, Only unsharp mask. Also view your image at 100% when sharpening. One tip from the Epson Online Experience that I purchased (which was great by the way) was to set the Threshold at 1 and radius at .4 start the amount at 500 and decrease by steps of 100 until you see no white halos around the edges of your objects. Always make unsharp the very last step in your Post Processing. If need be create a duplicate layer, sharpen the layer and mask out areas that don't need to be sharpen. This lets you selectively sharpen your photo. As I said they are many other techniques, but this is what I have been using.