In vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data processing, the first step might be to separate the down-going wavefield from the up-going wavefield. When using a masking filter for VSP wave separation, there are difficulties associated with two termination ends of the up-going waves. A critical challenge is how the masking filter can restore the energy tails, the edge effect associated with these terminations uniquely exist in VSP data. An effective strategy is to implement masking filters in both τ-p and f-k domain sequentially. Meanwhile it uses a median filter, producing a clean but smooth version of the down-going wavefield, used as a reference data set for designing the masking filter. The masking filter is implemented adaptively and iteratively, gradually restoring the energy tails cut-out by any surgical mute. While the τ-p and the f-k domain masking filters target different depth ranges of VSP, this combination strategy can accurately perform in wave separation from field VSP data.