Help on sharpening

I am not great at pp and was hoping to get some feedback on whether this picture is over sharpened or under sharpened or about right? Thanks in advance for your help.

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On my screen it looks way over sharpened. You have attracted allot of noise in the green background area. It depends on what your final use of the image is going to be. I do sharpening based on each image and its final use, ie. print or web display. I do masking to hide backgrounds or other elements that might get noise with sharpening that is required for the primary element in the image. If you use Lightroom or ACR you can do this masking at the time of sharpening which is one the nice things I do like about Adobe Camera RAW. I can't tell you what settings to use as it varies by image and what you want.

ssim wrote in post #12787994
On my screen it looks way over sharpened. You have attracted allot of noise in the green background area. It depends on what your final use of the image is going to be. I do sharpening based on each image and its final use, ie. print or web display. I do masking to hide backgrounds or other elements that might get noise with sharpening that is required for the primary element in the image. If you use Lightroom or ACR you can do this masking at the time of sharpening which is one the nice things I do like about Adobe Camera RAW. I can't tell you what settings to use as it varies by image and what you want.

Thanks for the information. I did this is Adobe Elements 6 using the sharpening tool. I am not sure which is best it or the unsharpen mask. I will go back and give it another try.

Locally sharpen the bird. Can you use a mask? Lower the Amount and Radius.

Higgs Boson wrote in post #12788042
Locally sharpen the bird. Can you use a mask? Lower the Amount and Radius.

Maybe I am just learning to use the mask. This one is sharpened a lot less.

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When you open the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw, go to the second tab where and you'll see a slider called "Masking". Try setting it to around 60 or 70 before you hit "open image". Then sharpen it in PSE.

shedberg wrote in post #12788139
When you open the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw, go to the second tab where and you'll see a slider called "Masking". Try setting it to around 60 or 70 before you hit "open image". Then sharpen it in PSE.

Thanks I will give it a try tonight.

I think the problem is the image is not sharp to start with. It's soft enough that it won't sharpen well. That's what it looks like to me.