I see spots

I haven't had my D10 too long but this is not what I expected. Shot RAW, then converted to TIFF use CL1, then 50% USM with PS7 then saved as large JPG. This is a crop of original at 100%.
Why does the skin have spots? Are these artifacts?
ISO 800
1/90
f/11.0
Canon 70-200 at 120mm
Outdoors cloudy

Thanks,
Sagebrush

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That image has a lot of noise because you used ISO 800 and sharpened it. The higher you set the ISO setting, the more noise you will see in the image. If you sharpen a noisy image, the noise will become even more apparent.

I think the dark spots are just spots on the person's face. It doesn't look like sensor dust or dirt on the lens.

Yup, deffo noise due to high ISO.

Yup, high ISO noise combined with strong sharpening.

I took your advice and did some noise reduction before sharpening.
Much, much better
Here's the results....

Thanks yall.

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The last image is better, but you could go one step better and try to sharpen the eyes . Heres an example. I selected the eyes, used blur and unsharp mask, than added catchlights and reduced the opacity of the white to around 67.

https://photography-on-the.net …hp?attachmentid​=324&stc=1

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Ahhhh! horror movie stuff!
Those catchlights look scary combined with the strong blur -but would prob look much better if it was all sharp

What USM settings did you use sagebrush? 50% at what radius?
I've noticed this kind of thing before
Sometimes there is certain noise that is made MUCH worse with any attempt at sharpening-I've heard people talk of chroma noise and luminance noise (i.e there are different types)
maybe this is one of the less common noise types?it just behaves totally different to normal when sharpened

The noise reduction example looks MUCH better .
If you find you still want more sharpness,a modest 40% sharpening at a large 5 radius may help

Ron,
I used a radius setting of 1.5 and a threshold of 1.0
I used Neat Image for noise reduction.