Without the EXIF data it is impossible to say, but there is nothing sharp in your image, if you had a good fast shutter speed, the vehicle was stationary, no crappy filter, it isn't a huge crop, etc then I'd say you have a soft lens, but to test that you need to put it in a tripod and do some controlled exposures in both manual and auto focus. It does not look like a micro AF issue as nothing is sharp, not meaning you don't need to do micro AF, but that the issue you have is masking any additional micro AF issue.
Here is how I test my lenses for sharpness and element misalignment. This series showed me extreme misalignment at 35mm with a 16-35, even at this size you can see the image right paper is more blurred than center and left.
And a little sharpen and rework on your elephant shot too.
You're right, I didn't give enough information.
Shot with Canon EOS 7D
EFIX data:
f/6,3
1/1000 sec
ISO 800
275mm
The vehicle was stationary, it's almost not cropped at all and I had on the Canon protection filter.
So, if my copy is soft, will Canon fix it under warranty?
What software and tool did you use to retouch my photo? I like what you did, except for some artifacts in the sky.
Thank you all for your responses!
As others have now said, the filter is not good and is costing you sharpness and contrast, I once had a Canon CPL, it was the worst filter I ever bought!
That will be your biggest improvement, after that shutter speed could be hurting you, at 275mm on the 7D you should be looking at 1/500 absolute minimum for pixel sharp images, 1/1000 as a minimum if you are a little excited, flustered or just drunk coffee! IS will help a bit, but I find light lenses to not get anywhere near as much sharpness improvement from IS as heavier lenses, maybe sprung to unsprung mass differentials play a part, maybe it is more difficult to jog a heavier lens, I don't know, just an observation I have made. Even at distance my 100 macro IS is not as effective as my 300 f2.8 even though the 100 has newer generation system.
After that it is probably just the lens, try some tests at home with no filter on a tripod with live view manual focusing, obviously just looking at the differing responses here and the different test results linked to there is some sample variation out there, but if you are not happy and it is a recent purchase send it back.
As for the post processing, I did it in ACR via Bridge, which is exactly the same as Lightroom, auto setting for exposure and contrast, your metering overexposed the scene because the elephants are dark and overwhelmed the Evaluative Metering (or Center Weighted or Spot, the only metering mode that would have nailed this image is Average Metering) simple grad filter for sky, vignette to draw attention to the subject and thats it, very simple and basic. My copy didn't get artifacts so I suspect it was the forum algorithm doing a bit of compression that introduced it.