Small scale geologic discontinuities are not easy to detect and image in the seismic data, as these features represent themselves as diffracted waves which are different from reflected waves. Using two different data examples, one simple model and one complex model, we illustrate the accuracy of separating diffraction by Plane-wave destruction (PWD) and Dip frequency filtering (DFF) on synthetic data set. In plane-wave destruction, our criteria is to calculate the smoothness and continuity of local events slopes that correspond to a reflection event, and the dip frequency filtering criteria is mainly dependent on the frequency wave number (f-k) of the seismic data. Our example models demonstrate the effectiveness of diffraction separation and possible imaging for high-resolution imaging of minor but significant geologic features. © 2017 SEG.