Unsharp Mask..is this good?

I'm using "PhotoImpact Pro 11" to sharpen with, I used the unsharp mask tool. Did I do ok? Let me know what you think.
Thanks, Jim
Before

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JMO, but I think you overcooked it by just a little bit. Back off a hair and I think you've got it knocked.

Cool action photo, btw...

i can't see any halos or anything like that, but if i had to nitpick i would say that the water looks more like ice than water in the sharpened one. if you brought it down a maximum of 10%, it would be perfect.

How is this one, did I cook it right this time? It's a hair different and not much more. I need to practice on this.

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I agree with FlyingPhotog about over sharpening. It is really tempting when we see the great improvement from a little sharpening to add a little more and the result is often adding too much. In addition, I think that it would be best to selectively only sharpen hard edges (the watercraft, in this instance). By doing selective sharpening, it gives the appearance of the whole image being much sharper.

Good point by Bill...

One other way to sharpen something like this that has noticeable highlites and angular lines is to "Overlay Sharpen" instead of USM...

I can't see too much difference. have you considered cloning out the rope?? It is an excellent shot that you have pulled off here. I'd love to see if it looked better cropped in and had the rope cloned out. Good job though, looks great!

Just a quick note: try to make sure you're seeking feedback on the image at the size you intend to use it at. For example, if you sharpen a 12MP capture so it appears sharp at 800x600 you'll have very seriously overcooked it. In general, you should be posting selective 100% crops from the image after any resizing you intend to do. Of course, you may happen to want 800x533 for some web usage, but if you've resized to that purely to post here, then the feedback above is going to be misleading. Cheers, Tony

Thanks for the advice on the sharpening everyone. Would it be safe to say that you want to resize the image before you apply sharpening? I need to work on my editing skills and not over do it, seems like this is what makes the picures pop.

^^^ Yup...

Resize .. Then Sharpen

jimken61 wrote in post #5467552
I'm using "PhotoImpact Pro 11" to sharpen with, I used the unsharp mask tool. Did I do ok? Let me know what you think.

I don't know anything about PhotoImpact Pro, but if it's got a "Threshold" slider in USM like Photoshop does, I'd recommend halving whatever value you've used.

jimken61 wrote in post #5474249
Thanks for the advice on the sharpening everyone. Would it be safe to say that you want to resize the image before you apply sharpening? I need to work on my editing skills and not over do it, seems like this is what makes the picures pop.

If you really want to get deeply into sharpening, the book, Real World Image Sharpening by Bruce Fraser is an excellent reference. In general, you sharpen twice:

1. the first time is when you do the initial post processing which typically would mean during the RAW conversion process if you shoot in RAW format.
   
2. the final sharpen is done as the final step after resizing and before saving a file. This final sharpening is very dependent upon the final use of the image. For web use, it may be little or none. For print, it is a highly variable thing depending on the specific type of print application, but frequently sharpening for print is very strong and will, as a result, look horrible on your monitor, but far better on paper.