I like shots like this - it reminds me a little of one of the wallpapers that came with Windows XP.
With my blurry "just woke up" eyes it looks like there might be a touch of high-frequency frosting on pretty much all of the leaves - it would be interesting to see if a small gaussean blur over all the leaves improved it at all.
yep, well I didn't think of bluring but sharpening the forground. Give more the feeling of dof..
Different sharpening. For the "3D" effect ("presence") you're typically using a radius of around 4 pixels and an amount of around 40% in a full-resolution image - the frosting usually occurs with too agressive capture sharpening on a full res image, or "sub-optimal" output sharpening on a down-sampled image.
The quick test is to simply apply a small gaussean blur over it (say, 0.3 pixels) and see if the frosting goes away.
Hmm. Interesting. I captured RAW and ensured no in-camera sharpening came across on the RAW-to-TIF conversion in my RAW converter. I then used radius=0.8, strength=100, r=5 on the full res image, saved that, and without closing it, downsized to Web size, then applied radius=0.4, strength=70, r=4. What did I do wrong? BTW, what is frosting? Sharpening is a big mystery to me. It seems every image needs something different.