Butterfly on Daisy c+c welcome!

[IMG[IMG]http://farm5.static.fl​ickr.com …4917800999_d00c​b68037.jpg
butterfly copy by cp1005, on Flickr

beautiful

echinacea

^ Yes.and lovely photo!

A well-seen image. I wished for you to have taken a few steps to the right so that the white flower at the tip of wings would not be such a distraction. It would also have helped to separate the two flowers so that only one was in the image frame. Both here and on your flicker page, the image shows up as brutally sharp with visible sharpening artifacts like the halo all around the wings... visible even on this tiny web-based image. The amount of sharpening you have used looks false and you could usefully back it off and not lose the subject.

One quick and dirty sharpening technique if you only sharpen once (ideally,it should be carried out just before you save the image and only once you have completed all of your image editing) is this: Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp mask then set the percentage value that you are most comfortable with and check and uncheck the preview checkbox to see the effect. Move the area of interest centrally into the viewing area on the dialogue box and the magnification should be set to 100%. This will help you to see what you are doing overall and what you are doing when zoomed in to 100%.

The next slider is the radius and, generally speaking, you should try to keep this value low (I typically would use a value of something like 0.3 ~ 0.5) then you can raise the percentage slider anywhere from say... 150 ~ 350% (it has a 500% maximum value) without doing crippling damage to the image with artifacts induced by excessive sharpening. The final slider in the unsharp mask dialogue box is named threshold. Normally it can remain on a value of 0. If you raise the threshold value (it has 255 points) you can selectively remove some of the sharpening effect. Where you have fine detail areas that are already sharp, you can apply unsharp mask in a way that will avoid corrupting the image detail that you already have present.

Initially, start with just the percentage and the radius sliders and constantly look at the effect at 100% zoom and on the image overall both with an without preview checked. Looking at the sharpening you have applied suggests that you will take a while to adjust to 'normal' sharpness. Having captured the butterfly from the side, the animal looks a little bit unidimensional and if you have other views, please post them and we could look at the varying treatments. Could you post an unsharpened image so that I can download and edit it, purely with sharpening? Remember that sharpness is an appearance that derives from apparent focus point and the contrast in an image.

Higher contrast causes an edge effect to become more noticeable as one colour transitions into another. So... out of two identical images, one high contrast and one low contrast, the high contrast image will appear to be sharper despite the images being identical. As a photographer, you can use that information to your advantage. For now, try and find some time to read around the subject of digital image sharpening using unsharp masking techniques (all digital images need sharpening to some degree) and look up something about edge effects.

Breathtaking!

For once.lol.I am not in the same park as Pixel I like the second flower in the shot, gives it depth for me and a lovely bokeh. I have a few butterfly photos that have simply been cropped, and their wings also looks tack sharp, but thats nothing to do with me Sometimes it just is what it is...

Flo wrote in post #10799955
For once.lol.I am not in the same park as Pixel I like the second flower in the shot, gives it depth for me and a lovely bokeh. I have a few butterfly photos that have simply been cropped, and their wings also looks tack sharp, but thats nothing to do with me Sometimes it just is what it is...

pm surveys rapidly disappearing fan club...

Aw c'mon Gail... I didn't even get the chance to send you my fan club membership and fee details.

What we think makes for a good composition crosses the line between accepted conventions (objective) of composition and the artistic (subjective) photographic eye that we bring to the subject material we have captured. I have been known to be wrong in my judgement (on numerous occasions and far more than I can count) and I accept that, for you, I am wrong on this occasion. We wont fall out over it (I will even give you a fan club fee reduction of $10.00 for this year's membership) and I will learn something new.

Who loves ya Pixel....[and I am a fan.totally]...it is so subjective, that's what I love about this hobby, something new always enters the picture( so to speak)

Very nice. Great sharpness on the subject and OOF background. Well done.

THank you all for your comments--
Pixelmangler--I have resharpened the image --I totally agree that it was oversharpened-and would love to hear your comments---I am also attaching an unedited copy --I would love to see your take on it (It is a jpeg--I am unsure how to post a raw file?) THanks!

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/36657249@N08/4​963373717/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/36657249@N08/4​963374597/