I like unsharp masking, although I don't use it very much. Before going down that road, I'd make sure that my system was optimized. First, is the ground glass in the proper place. (I once bought a 4x5 TLR. I asked the owner, "How are the pictures." "Soft," he said. Well, they should've been, as the ground glass was in backwards and there was a silk stocking taped over the back of the taking lens. Once these were taken care of, the lens was excellent.) Are your film holders flat, and do they hold the negative in the proper place? Are you shooting at an ideal aperture? Have you tried using a green filter to increase resolution? Is the camera support system rigid _and_ non-resonant enough that vibration isn't a problem? I'm trying to remember the name of a photowriter (Feininger?) from the 50's and 60's who took lots of skyline shots of NY. He built a special camera with lots of aircraft cable stabilizers especially for the task. You'll probably want to use a second tripod (or a monopod) under the lens, and you might try clipping something like a carbon fiber arrow shaft from the top of the front standard to the top of the rear one to increase stability. I'm sure I'm missing a few important details here. In the darkroom is your enlarger aligned properly, and is the negative being held flat? ...As Howard Bond has said, unsharp masking is a worthwhile thing to try after you have everything else nailed down. A friend of mine jumped in way to soon. He couldn't even spot prints well, and he was making all sorts of masks. His prints looked like crap. There were spots _everywhere_! (Unsharp masking makes spot control harder than normal.) Eventually, he left the hobby. He would have been better served getting the basics down before moving off into esoterica. In three or four years, he never produced what I'd consider a decent print, although he made hundreds of masks. It must've been very frustrating.
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