One of my processing weak points is control of sharpening. I waver between too little and too much.
I need your input and observations concerning the sharpening of this pic.
The angle of the bird makes him look a bit foreshortened.

Did you sharpen the whole image or just the bird?

The reason I ask is that I see the tiniest hint of a sharpening halo behind the head, and another, less typical & darker halo of sorts in front of the head.

There seems to be some granularity / noise in the background as well which sharpening will bring out even more.

I have two favorite sharpening methods for selective sharpening.

One is to select just the areas I want to sharpen avoiding the edges of the subject to background transition and sharpen just the selection.

The other, is to sharpen the whole image on a separate layer, convert that layer to a mask, fill with black and then paint with white at varying opacities in the areas I want the sharpening to show.

At first glance this one didn't look particularly sharp to me, but I think it is more of a matter of the point of critical sharpness being on the flank of the bird just below the wing, rather than on the eye.

With the head at the angle it is at, the eye and the tip of the bill are almost exactly on the same plane relative to the sensor, so they should be almost exactly the same level of sharp. The tip of the bill is a bit out of focus. Actually, the eye is too, but the tip of the bill is more noticeable.

I hope this helps some.

Or . . . buy PhotoKit Sharpener and use the sharpening brushes to sharpen just those areas you wish to have sharp.

Honestly, it's much easier.

Jim

I used Photokit (wonderful tool) to selectively sharpen the bird's body. There was no sharpening applied to the BG whatsoever.

Here's a repost with some halo cleaning applied:

I'll have to try the demo (if there is one). Although it reads like a lot of work, I can sharpen most images in about 30 seconds with my method, so it would have to be a really great tool to get me to shell out for it.

Since there was no sharpening to the BG, I'd be tempted to do a slight blur on it or run some noise reduction, but that isn't what this thread is about . . .

It's harder to compare scrolling back and forth between them, but the second version has a sharper beak for sure.