Focus on the wing tip

Many times we see wonderful images, where the wing tip (usually the one closer to the camera, but not necessarily) is sharper than the rest of the bird, head included.

Whatever the reason for this, it can be helped in post-processing.

If it is not too much, duplicate the layer, sharpen as you usually do on the top layer.
Go to the bottom of the layer's palette and click on the third box from the left. This will create a layer mask.
Making sure that black is selected as the foreground color in the Tool palette, choose the Brush Tool (B on your keyboard), with no hardness (available in the brush drop menu on the task bar on top) and paint the sharpening off with the black brush. You can choose to lower the opacity of the brush in the task bar also.

If this is not enough, then we need to take a more aggressive approach:

After the file is sharpened to taste, duplicate the layer. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, check preview and when the wingtip looks good, after trying different amounts of blurirng, press OK.
Go to the bottom of the layers palette, third box from left, click and create a layer mask.
Again, making sure black is foreground color, choose the brush tool and paint (erase) everything black but the offending wing tip.
White will have the opposite effect.

This technique can be used for many selective adjustments.
Try to do all of this on an uncompressed file such as TIFF versus a jpg for quality reserving reasons.

Hope this helps some of you :)

Thanks Fabs.

I will have to try this.

Thanks Fabs. That was the simpliest explanation I've seen. This should heip with my post-processing.

Roy