1st Attempt... Better or Worse?

[squishy]

aaah, you see thats a bad idea i'd always wait and do it at home

[Jason Green]

Is it? Thanks. Well, I suppose I can see why... you can't control the output quality percentage and so it may be given added noise?

[squishy]

there is no advantage to doing it on camera.

i'd much prefere to do it at home where you can frame it exactly how you want

[NickCantle]

Plus you're draining your battery of valuable shooting time when faffing with images!

[Jason Green]

Two good points, both - thanks!

[Geoff F]

Firstly, I will once again recommend this site for learning digital editing techniques Digital Photography Tutorials it does go from novice to expert a bit quickly and will take a bit of time to read and understand everything but there is a mass of good advice there.

With your example, what were the Unsharp Mask settings? Did you use any threshold or other even cleverer techniques to avoid amplifing the noise? As a quick, but not professional, work around I often put a selection around the area to be sharpened then feather the selection by 5 pixels, approx, and use 1 level of threshold. Other settings around 0.5 to 2 pixels and 50 to 150% for the amount. But don't overdo it!

The clever way is to create a duplicate layer, add a mask which hides everything then gradually reveal the areas to be sharpened with a low opacity soft brush so some areas will be totally clear while others are only partially visible and some are totally hidden. You then apply an Unsharp Mask to this layer so you end up with variable amounts of sharpening.

And there are other methods. But I won't go into too much detail now. Ask again after reading that free tutorial if there is anything you don't understand. I expect there will be!

Most professionals recommend setting the camera adjustments for sharpness/saturation to 0 and doing a pre sharpen with Unsharp Mask around 200-300% at 0.3 pixels before doing any editing.

Shooting in RAW is always best. And above all else when editing, no matter what programme, never never never use any Auto Adjust setting. Curves, or Levels, manual saturation etc takes a little bit of learning but isn't difficult and is the only way to be in full control of the results.

[squishy]

Also, photographically, I think it's better to leave it un-cropped with more room where the subject is looking. It makes it more pleased to look at