A new algorithm is introduced to combat high-frequency thermal smear. This algorithm has been shown to give an extra sharpness boost to thermal prints that is not achievable by traditional sharpening algorithms. This algorithm should be tuned in conjunction with traditional thermal smear and sharpening algorithms. It is possible to preconvolve the text-smear filter with the sharpening filter resulting in the ability to apply a single filter to the image. The single filter applies sharpness and text-smear correction in one step.