Sharpening

There are a myriad of ways to sharpen your photos and everyone has their preferred way. Try out the ones you hear about and adopt your choice. The trick is not to overdo it and make it the last thing you do before saving your photo. I will attempt at a later time to suggest some pointers for you if you would like, I am not an expert, but have used Photoshop for over ten years now and have forgotten more than I have learnt about it. There are other forum members here that can help as well. I will try and post something tonight about it.

Woko i have never used PS Pro but would say that alot of the tools and methods would be similar to photoshop. What Windhover has said about using masking techniques is the key to a lot of useful adjustments,  because once you have your mask as a selection and you have fine tuned it so it is a nice tight fit around your subject, you can make adjustments to the way you perceive your photo to be. You may wish to increase the saturation and contrast, a curves or levels adjustment to help correct some exposure issue etc. and of course To Sharpen. When you are happy with your adjustments of the main subject then you can go to the selection menu and select "inverse" which will then select the opposite of what you had before, then you can blur or clone out unwanted areas of the background that may be distracting without doing damage to your original subject that you masked for the first selection. By using masks enables you to just adjust the parts that need it not a global adjustment, which most times with the type of photography we generally do for this site is what is required. As in your 1st  photo above the background looks a bit smoother because it didn't have artifacts introduced to it as the 2nd photo has, so what I am getting at is, you only needed in this photo to sharpen the bird and the terracotta bird bath so using masks achieves this and the possibility of fading out the background a bit more to emphasise the main elements of your photo. You may not choose to spend all this time on every photo, but on the the ones you like,it is worthwhile.

  For a quick and easy global sharpen of your photo that works ok, go to "unsharp mask" or usm under the filters menu and set the amount to 100%, radius to 0.3 - 0.5 and threshold to 0, this tends to concentrate on the edges and feather detail without adding a great deal of artifacts to the overall photo. you can increase the radius slider up to 1.0 if you think you need it, but I have rarely used more than 0.6. Another way is to set amount to 20%, radius to 10 and threshold at 0. try it and see what you think, you may not even like it but that's your choice. As qyn55 stated there is a lot of information on the net about sharpening techniques, but nothing beats getting a great sharp photo in the first place. Hope this helps.

Woko I hope you don't mind but I copied your first photo and sharpened it a little and added a bit of blur to the background just to see if you like it, I am not really sure how it will look when it comes up and if this was done from the original it would also make it better. Of course I have deleted the photo from my computer, afterall it is yours. You can't tell much from this photo size but the background doesn't have the artifacts that photo2 has. This was very minor sharpening; amount 100%, radius 0.3 and threshold 0

Photoshop is a big big animal and maybe quantum mechanics is easier.

Woko just one more thing before I delete your photo is to show you a photo done with the masking technique. This is a very rough example as I didn't put a lot of time into it and should have refined the mask more but just to show anyway. Do remember these are small file sizes and if done tp the original would have a better result.

Hey Woko

If it was not for the Content-aware fill tool in Photoshop CS5, I would not care about how old a version I use. Although later versions, especially CS6 now, seem to have be able to get more out of the images' dynamic range. Which does help.

I like what Shane has done to illustrate the possibilities. Being a purist from a photography perspective, I'd try to achieve that soft, smooth, out of focus background using my photographic skills rather than a blur filter in photoshop, but it does very nicely show the difference and more aesthetic appeal that are gained by having the subject well isolated from the background.

The reason why your image has a busy background is because you probably angled the shot downwards thus did not have sufficient space behind the bird, and far enough for the lens' optics to render it smooth and out of focus.

Here is an example. This was done all just by considering the angle from which I took the shot. I got low, laying on the ground actually, and the background was the grass a long, long way away. Birdie actually asked me if it was real or done in Photoshop. She also knows that I don't manipulate backgrounds, but she asked as it looked too smooth probably.

http://amatteroflight.com/gallery2/d/6492-1/Purple-Swamphen-20100309-_MG_4569.jpg

Elements is good, but it lacks many of the really good features in Photoshop. In my humble opinion it is really useful to know the many methods with which I can enhance an image, but I prefer to fiddle as little as possible with images after I've taken them. Most often I just do some very basic ACR adjustments (ACR = Adobe Camera Raw - it is the interface that opens RAW files in Photoshop) that include minor exposure and recovery (recovery - of highlights if needed), blacks, vibrance and clarity adjustments. Then in Photoshop a minor levles and curves pop. That's it.

Moved to the new photography sub-forum