[Gary Bagshawe]

Shot as the sun was going down this pm, I looked into the garden and saw these leaves with a gorgeous colour from the setting sun.

[Bachs]

Lovely colours...the leaf could maybe do with a little selective sharpening.

I've just got back from a walk in the woods whilst I left the women nattering.
Might post some later if theyr'e any cop

[Garnock]

I agree with Bachs, lovely colours.

Rather than sharpening the leaves I would blur the background more.
Ideally a shallower DOF would be the answer. ( If the leaves are still there )

Cameron

[Arkady]

Sorry, it just looks soft to me.
This kind of thing needs to be absolutely 'pinners' to work effectively.

I reckon we've got another three days of good, bright weather in the UK (depending where you live), so forget the Photoshop stuff; forget trying to save it in Post-Production - get out and shoot it again.

If we can't get a sharp image of a leaf - one that's stuck to a tree that isn't trying to run away, there's no hope for any of us

The hardest thing for any of us is to be told our images are no good.

It's also the best way of improving ourselves - Paul Delmar at Sheffield Uni just ripped our images up every day we were there - and we're professional photographers with years of experience under our belts.
All you'd hear from him was : "Out of focus; soft; out of focus; soft; soft; etc." It was shattering, especially as you sometimes couldn't see the problem yourself.
One poor guy had his critique thus: "Every single compositional error that can be made in photography is evident in this image! How long did you say you've been a photographer?"

Harsh. And the re-shoot had to be done in 10 minutes - and it always involved photographing people. "Go and take an image of a Clinical Biologist! Be back here in half an hour..." and off you'd go...

[Gary Bagshawe]

Point taken, this image IS soft as I applied a small amount of GBlur to it to soften the image and give it a warmer softy feely type thing. The same sort of thing that I do to my girly pics.

[Arkady]

Try keeping the central point sharp with the edges blurred - I do the same thing with my girly shots, but instead of applying to the whole image, I make a selction with the lasso tool at 180 pixels, invert the selection and apply Gaussian Blur to the edges. It sort of focusses attention to the main subject.
Check out some of the images on my gallery page (link below) to see what I'm on about.

[Gary Bagshawe]

Cheers for the tip, I will have to try it out.

[Gandhi]

Originally Posted by Arkady

Sorry, it just looks soft to me.
This kind of thing needs to be absolutely 'pinners' to work effectively.

I reckon we've got another three days of good, bright weather in the UK (depending where you live), so forget the Photoshop stuff; forget trying to save it in Post-Production - get out and shoot it again.

If we can't get a sharp image of a leaf - one that's stuck to a tree that isn't trying to run away, there's no hope for any of us

The hardest thing for any of us is to be told our images are no good.

It's also the best way of improving ourselves - Paul Delmar at Sheffield Uni just ripped our images up every day we were there - and we're professional photographers with years of experience under our belts.
All you'd hear from him was : "Out of focus; soft; out of focus; soft; soft; etc." It was shattering, especially as you sometimes couldn't see the problem yourself.
One poor guy had his critique thus: "Every single compositional error that can be made in photography is evident in this image! How long did you say you've been a photographer?"

Harsh. And the re-shoot had to be done in 10 minutes - and it always involved photographing people. "Go and take an image of a Clinical Biologist! Be back here in half an hour..." and off you'd go...

Personaly, I'm all for this type of critique!

It is indeed the only way you learn. More power to your lecturer I think!