Ruta

I have to say, this may be the nicest forum I've ever been on. Thank you all so much for your help. I only hope that one day I know enough to pass on the knowledge to someone else. I will certainly investigate/try the techniques that you have all mentioned. Thanks again

This is the effect you get from shooting at f4 i.e. shallow depth-of-field (DOF).
If you look at the regions, the red one is 'sharper' than the green one or the white one. If you look closer at the green one and the white one, as you look from the center of the image out to their respective edgee, the 'sharpness' fades out evenly -- based relatively from where the camera was held.
If MDM is online today, he can show you some PP (post processing) ideas to remove softness. In the film days. photographers used various techniques to 'fix' the images such as unsharp mask and other contrast enhancers. Digital photographs sometimes need that same approach.
From the taking-the-shot perspective, for things like you have here, try using more DOF by way of increasing the f-stop. Start at say f5.6 or f6.4 and go up from there, but do not be surprised to find yourself shooting at f11 or so. There is also a technique called 'focus bracketing' that can be really handy for shots like this.
Do not be afraid of boosting the ISO to keep the image from being dark, the X-T4 has plenty of noise free latitude. Of course, there are tripods.
Uhh, at the risk of changing the subject, if you are intending to print these, try changing your camera settings to 300 dpi over your current 72 dpi and use the Adobe color space instead of the sRGB color space. But why do that is the subject for another different thread.

It is ok and I like it, just need a touch of PP. Just a little bit.

Hello back at you! I am still ‘Alive and Kicking’. How are you doing these days?
But always though, as you and Greybeard show, I cannot get lazy in looking at these images, I should look closer. But the image, as shot, looks okay to me. 😀

Hi Jerryy! How is it going!
The lens in 16-80. I load jpg in Capture One and see that sharpness slider set to zero. It could be due the camera setup. When you switch the sharpness off  images might looks realy soft.

I adjusted it as it should be and it helps a bit

Ruta, if you have RAF file as well post it here. C1 can show where the real focus point in the image is.

There is a bit of softness from what i can tell…
can you post the settings used for that particular image and what lens you used?

The EXIF settings are below the image on the left side. The lens name is missing though, but just guessing from the entry for Maximum Aperture = 4.0, it could be a 35mm or a short zoom.
As Greybeard mentions, the low-res version as well as the larger version looks okay. Some things to note:
1.) The x and y resolutions are set to 72 dpi. On a computer screen which uses 96dpi or 120 dpi, you can run into some scaling issues from the monitor’s display algorithms that can make it seem softer than it is.
2.) You are shooting at f4, which does not have a deep depth of field such as what you may expect coming from cell phone cameras. What that means is that some parts of the image will seem soft or out of focus compared to others depending on the selected focus point — for example: the pen is fine, the letters seem soft. Try using f8 or f11 or even f 14 as a minimum for this shot and see if you get “sharper” images. Depth of field is an artistic effect that takes some getting used to.
HTH.