I had this photo rejected for jagged lines, possibly due to being over sharpened.
The exact same photo had been rejected on another site for being soft.
Since I am not so familiar yet with editing and spotting the details where I should see that change is still required this confuses me, and I was wondering if anyone can help me point out where exactly I can see what caused the rejection for this photo.

Speciifically you've got the airberlin.com and Air Berlin titles looking too harsh from my eye. You have to watch out for these high contrast borders.

How do you sharpen? Do you use plain USM or some other tool? Do you mask off areas?

I only use Unsharp mask, and usually I select with the magic wand, as described on the site here, in order to select everything apart from the sky. I'm not familiar yet with other options.

You should consider using Smart Sharpen and layer masks with semi-opaque brush strokes to blend jagged areas into the unsharpened bottom layer. Once you get used to this method you'll be able to do sharpen things quickly and only sharpen what you want to.

A quick way to do it:

1. Bring your image into Photoshop.

2. Downsample it to your desired size.

3. Duplicate your background layer into a new layer, set the blend mode to luminance. This will sharpen only via luminance and keeps color fringing out.

4. Sharpen the top layer using your tool of choice.

5. Use your wand and other selection tools to make a rough selection (e.g. blue sky), then go to Select > Invert to invert the selection.

6. Click the Make Layer Mask button in the layers palette. It looks like a hollow white circle inside of a box.

Now you've got a layer mask. The "white" areas in the mask are where the layer is exposed, while black areas reveal the background underneath. You can now use the pencil or paintbrush tools to paint in a mask to reveal your unsharpened bottom layer.

The power here is you can use the pencil/brush tool at a varying opacity level (I like using 30%) and you can layer multiple transparent brush strokes on the mask to blend sharpened and unsharpened areas into one composite image. This lets you take the edge off the sharpening while still keeping a little amount of acutance enhancement. It sounds like it takes a lot of time, but it's really very quick once you get the hang of it.

You can also use this method to paint out complex backgrounds in panning shots. For instance:


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Photo © Dan Vincent - New England Airports


In this KLM panning shot, the entire background/foreground is masked out and no sharpening is applied to it. Why bother sharpening a blurry area? You'd just reveal noise and enhance edges that you don't really want to enhance. Without making a mask, you'd be spending a tedious amount of time using the selection tools instead of the far more powerful brush tools. Plus, it's non-destructive - you can always erase or paint in more mask at any time, so long as you haven't flattened the image. Oversharpened rejection? Just go in and paint out some sharpening. Too soft? Add in a little more sharpening and you don't need to redo all of your careful masking.

One of these days I'm going to make a video on sharpening workflow... text does it no justice.

[Edited 2009-10-01 10:55:46]