Gardenia..cropped, sharpened, adjusted

This picture was taken RAW a f/8, 1/10, focal length 75, then cropped, sharpened (a lot) and contrast adjusted. Did I overdo it?

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There seems to be a lot of noise in the image, and you've applied a general sharpening which accentuates it even more.

You could do your sharpening on a seperate layer and use a mask to limit where you sharpen.

Thanks, I was afraid of the oversharpening. I'm a bull in the china shop with post processing. I felt the flower really needed it, because it was close to being blown out. Should I go back and 'denoise' the leaves and background and leave the sharpening in the flower?

I've now run this through Noise Ninja to reduce the noise, except I save the sharpening in the flower. Better? Not better?

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Leaves look too waxy like that. Again, I would simply limit the sharpening to the flower and exclude the leaves/background.\

Make sure you use a threshold that will avoid sharpening the noise in the flower as well. Probably something in the range of 6 would be where I started and tweak from there.

OK. I tried this one with just the flower sharpened. (Did adjust brightness on background)

Much nicer.

Thank you!