I tried it!

Thanks Sean! I tried your technique and it is great. I am not much of a 'sharpener' in general but I was really impressed with these results.. could you explain how changing the opacity of the applied background image (set to darken) affects the overall effect? It seems like an 'add more to get less' scenario and I want to wrap my mind all the way around the technique so I can understand what I'm doing...

Here are the BIG versions of my before and after images, since you really can't see the difference much in smaller/resized compressions.

Keep up the good work!
: D