Having done some work doing "selective sharpening and softening" on the squirrel yesterday, I decided to tackle a rabbit shot from last year!

The first shots are the original pic plus a close crop, showing a fairly "busy" background and a bit of noise.

When I originally processed this using Lightroom version 1.4, I knew that if I went heavy on the "global" sharpening that the background "noisyness" would show it, so instead I went light on the sharpening and then applied some noise reduction. The second pics are the result and a close crop, where you can see image noise and still a too-busy background.

Well, I decided to apply local adjustment brushes, one to sharpen the rabbit, and one to soften the background (I left some alone right around the rabbit, areas that were "in focus". The last two pics show the results!