Greater Scaup female portrait

[AlvanBuckley]

ISO 400
0 ev
f/5.6
SS 1/500
Nikon D300s + VR 80-400 @ 400mm

Straightened, cropped, sharpened and a few retouches of white spots on the head.
Did I over do the sharpening this time around?
Shot in Newfoundland, Canada this past April. I'll post the male tomorrow!

thanks in advance for any advice!

Alvan Buckley

[Danny J Brown]

Hi Alvan - I love the female scaup and this little girl gave you a nice look! Seems like you lost a little detail during cropping and the eye is bit blurry so you might have "underdone" it a bit with the sharpening. Keep them coming!

DB

[Dan Busby]

A very nice bird in a very nice setting Alvan. Doesn't look like you over sharpened to me - if anything it looks a tad soft. Maybe a bit more sharpening would help.

[arash_hazeghi]

very nice low angle and eye contact, feather detail is missing though, perhaps due to compression or too much noise reduction.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Angle, mood and eye contact look very good. Another vote for more sharpening.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Loved the low angle, head angle and the beautiful blue color. As others have pointed out, a little soft. Did you do a lot of NR on the entire image? Most of us here do NR only on the background.

[AlvanBuckley]

Thanks for all your advice.
I've sharpened the image a little more and have posted the result here. Previously I had only used the "edge sharpen" adjustment with Aperture but now I have used that in addition to the "Sharpen" adjustment. Does anyone else here have experience with Aperture? Which sharpening adjustment do you usually use?

I didn't do any noise reduction on the image. There is a relatively big crop on the image though so that may be the reason for it looking that way?

thanks again!