I'm of course greatly appreciative of ALL the feedback.
The sun had just risen. This uncropped image was merely auto sharpened after
opening the JPEG image in Camera Raw in CS5. I'm well aware it would behoove
me to investigate Artie's tutorials which I've acquired, but have merely glanced at.
After cropping the image in Camera Raw, I sharpened it at 88 using a radius of 1.0,
Detail 25, Masking 0. Noise Reduction overall was Luminance 79, Lum. Detail 50,
Lum. Contrast 0, Lum. Color 0. After resizing, I sharpened the image slightly and
used the Lasso Tool to outline the bird from the background with the latter having
noise reduced with the Filter option at a strength of 3, preserving details at 25%,
reducing color noise at 45%, and sharpening details at 25%.
Arash, you have not been keeping up with Artie's blog. See his thoughts here . . .
http://www.birdsasart-blog.com/2011/...mmentsimage-1/
Read the paragraph with his second "smiley" in particular.
In a review of the steps I followed I just noticed the "remove JPEG artifact" check box.
Humm . . .
I don't know why, but I have run into the "muddy" effect in detail even at much closer range.
Any and all additional thoughts are very welcome.