It is never too late, you can always fix the image you are not happy with. Today I want to talk about sharpening and blurring tool. If you have an image and it is not perfectly nice and crisp as you anticipated, do not use the sharpen too. When I was doing photo restoration years ago I worked with lot of customers who asked for sharpening their images a bit, or remove the backgrounds. Depending on the image quality, sharpening does not always worked because it can really digitize the image, and removing a background I found that it looked kind of superficial, especially if the object was taken on the busy background. So instead of sharpening tool, I would use blurring tool. You probably saying, what more blur - no way. Yes more blur, but what I would do I would add blur to the selected background. The reason is that if you add more blur to the background the contrast difference is greater between the main object and the background, and our eyes then automatically perceive the main object to be sharper. 
Now I will lead you through a verbal steps how I fixed the blue heron photo. When I was taking this photo, the branches were very close to the heron, so I could not get the portrait effect, or that nice blurred background in order to emphasize the heron. Therefore, the photo itself looked very busy, as a matter fact since I was taking this very fast to make sure I will not loose him, the auto mode focused on the branches behind - as they appeared more sharper. I liked the photo of the heron and I wanted to use it in my postcard to people, so there was a little fixing to do, and here are steps using Adobe Photoshop, and I am sure that it will be similar for other photo editing software.
[1] Crop the image to the desired size - 400 px by 400 px in 72 dpi.
[2] Duplicate background photo and create a new layer for reference.
[3] Select the background around the heron and save the background.
[4] Ensure that you are working with duplicate later. Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set radius to 1.5 px.
[5] Deselect the background and see if you like the effect, if not just undo and try different radius.
[6] Perform final touches on the image by using curves, color and level adjustments. Auto color and auto level may work well to sometimes.
If you still not happy and you think that the main object is not standing out as much as you want then you can do few more steps.
[7] Reselect the background or load the selection, and then inverse the selection to select the heron or main object.
[8] Instead of using sharpening tool which can be very crude, use Unsharpen mask instead by going to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask, set Amount to 100%, Radius to 0.4 px, and Threshold to 0. To get the result I usually play with radius and leave the other two fixed.
Note the above instructions are for web photo so the resolution is 72 dpi. For printing always use 200 dpi or more, therefore, you may want to play around with the suggested settings below to get the best result as they may not work for the low resolution photo.
Hope you can use this tip in the future. It may be old info soon as more and more cameras come equipped with technology called face recognition. However, never never know.
'Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.' ~ by Benjamin Spock
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