Ruby-crowned Kinglet

Posted the processed version in the Birds forum and had a little critique there so thought I would take the advice and play around with the image a little.
The advice was to back off the saturation of the background a little.
Anyone interested in playing around with the photo is more than welcome. Let me know if I'm cropping correctly for the right composition as well and any thing else.

1. Original

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/oZTk​w8

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/pEed​Am

I'd consider:
crop closer to tail top and left.
Some loss of colour on the bird in the last image - I'd bring that back (yellows and red).

#2 background was overwhelming.

3.

maybe a touch too sharp on the feathers, and i would clone out that little nub of a branch under the bird. As i think Martin is saying, the saturation on the bird in 2 is good but the saturation of the background in 3 is better. Of course, accuracy of the bird's colors is probably the most important thing.

Then second and third images are way too oversharpened. Personally I would only slightly sharpen the overall image and spot sharpen with a brush needed areas. From there I would bump the curve slightly in the middle and add a very very small hint of saturation.

drumsfield wrote in post #17254090
Then second and third images are way too oversharpened. Personally I would only slightly sharpen the overall image and spot sharpen with a brush needed areas. From there I would bump the curve slightly in the middle and add a very very small hint of saturation.

+1

Soft images can be much pleasing than attempts to sharpen them.

Thanks everyone for the lesson. I will play around with the image more.
One question and maybe I can find this online, but how do you tell when someone over sharpens the image?

Thanks again.

over sharpening is generally a matter of making things look unnatural. In this case, the feathers on the bird's neck and back look more like a metal file than soft feathers. This might be due to your over sharpening of the original, or, it might be because you sharpened a large image, then downsized it making the sharpening appear to be over done. I think most folks will give a minor sharpening to the original, then sharpen individual images to the output resolution.

For this image you might look into a gentle overall sharpening and then using a brush to sharpen the tail feathers and area right around the face. Tail feathers because they are almost falling out of focus and the face because it is an important point of interest. You could do something similar with the saturation of the bird vs the background.

also want to say that it is a really nice image, you did a good job.