Backyard bird plunge

[AlwaysOnAuto]

I cleaned up the bird bath this morning, not that the birds care, but they did seem to enjoy it once I'd left the yard.

[Shadowman]

Nice effort.

[Wavelength]

A pleasing image

[bnnrcn]

+1 to Nandakumar

[AlwaysOnAuto]

I'm afraid this shot lost a lot of its sharpness with the downsizing.

[Dave Humphries]

I'm afraid this shot lost a lot of its sharpness with the downsizing.

This is normal Alan, because of the size you uploaded - it looks like you did not downsize at all and instead relied upon TinyPic to do so (this is a bad idea).

I know this because they changed it to 1,599px × 1,066px, from whatever you uploaded.

However, it is complicated by the fact that folks' browsers will size the image 700px × 467px to display in the thread.

It won't show at the 'full (image) size' unless it is clicked on to view in the CiC LyteBox feature AND (in many cases) not until the "F" key is pressed - only then will folks be seeing image pixels at the same size as their display pixels, which is essential for highest quality viewing. If those image pixels were sharpened (after manually downsizing yourself), everything should look good.

Best practice is to downsize (a copy of your image) yourself, to say 900 or 950 pixels in height, then sharpen it with UnSharp Mask (USM) with figures in this 'ballpark'; Amount 100%, Radius 0.3 px, Threshold 1. However, the best settings to use will depend upon the image content and I commonly use amounts between 70 and 150%, Radius is usually 0.3 px, occasionally 0.4 and Threshold is 0 if image low noise (after downsizing) and containing a lot of busy/fine detail, but anything up to 10 if the image is noisy and especially if this shows on bland areas like the sky or an out of focus darkish background (as you have). Don't foprget to save this as an easily identifiable downsized jpg copy of your full size (processed) image. Only then upload it to TinyPic (or wherever).

Yes, I know that's a phaff (and some can't be bothered), but it's a choice to make; quality over ease.

HTH, Dave