You caught a pretty nice pose, but her face looks soft to me. A slight head turn your way would have made for a little better connection.
There are a lot of JPG artifacts hanging around in this image. I notice that you used "Save As" rather than "Save for Web." Save As is great provided you don't have to drop the quality slider too far to get in under the size limits. It also has the advantage of preserving the EXIF data in a way tha can be read.
With the heavy compression, there are a lot of issues that are hard to work with, but I selectively sharpened the face & breast area, smoothed the JPG artifacts out of the BG (there were a lot around the bill, so it looks a bit off) and darkened the G a bit to help the subject stand out.
Some of the feathers look a bit over sharpened now, but I think you could avoid that starting from the original.
Thanks for the work and the advice, Jim, but when I put my 467x700-pixel copy of the image beside it, I cannot, after five minutes of study, find even a minute difference. Could it be my monitor? It's a 24-inch Mac. Or is this an insiders' joke?
Maybe I posted the wrong one initially. I ended up pulling it down to work on some more because I wasn't happy with the outcome and then ended up getting distracted by my day job. Here's the version I didn't like. In some ways, I think I made it worse. . .
female cardinal
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