Northern Cardinal

[Bruce Spell]

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Another local resident here in the desert southwest. Not thrilled with the background on this one but I've tried to lower the saturation on it to see if that will make it less distracting.

Olympus E5; 90-250 f/2.8 + 2.0 TC; f/6.3; 1/1000; ISO 200; monopod
Developed in ACR then to PS CS5 for vertical crop, exposure change on background, NR on background, size for web and output sharpening.
Would love to hear all comments and suggestions.

[arash_hazeghi]

good portrait with nice head angle, colors and pose. It looks a bit soft and lacking in details and the BG was a bit busy, I might try to clone the oof blades in the foreground

TFS

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Bruce, love the angled pose with the raised crest, and I do like the deep reds, these guys have. I agree with Arash that the cardinal looks a touch soft. Maybe another round of sharpening will help, and you could also smoothen out the BG too. An excellent subject to try to bring out the best of him.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Good looking individual, and he sure does have a large crest! Very interesting perch with tons of character. I agree with you about the BG...lots of stray twigs to distract. You should setup that perch higher and in a spot with a more distant BG...that should take care of that and at the same time also help avoid the out of focus stuff at bottom of the frame.

[Bruce Spell]

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First, thanks for the comments and the wonderful suggestions. I truly am trying to learn how to make my shots better. In this repost I've tried to incorporate the suggestions given with respect to the softness, lack of detail, and the background. Specifically, I added a linear burn to bring out more detail in the bird. I also tried a lens blur on the background. finally, I tried a new sharpening technique. On my monitor these changes have resulted in improvements in some areas but the result seems much darker and I'm not sure if the repost is actually better than the original.

If anyone has the time (and the desire to help this newbee with some processing suggestions) I've uploaded the original RAW image here: http://home.comcast.net/~bruce_spell/P1193957.ORF. If this is frowned upon I'll be happy to take the file down and work through the wonderful critique given.

Thanks to everyone for your time and patience with me!

[arash_hazeghi]

will take a look at your raw later this week Bruce

best

Arash

[Bruce Spell]

Yikes! I just attempted to re-calibrate my monitor and no wonder my images look so bad to everyone. Talk about being WAY off on brightness and contrast. I'm quite embarrassed to say the least. I've only run a s/w calibration routine so there could still be some adjustments needed but I hope it is some better. The other thing I notices is for some reason my ACR conversions were being done in sRGB. I was wondering why all my images looked one way while in Photoshop but looked so much different when posted. Double whammy!

I've taken one more stab at a repost. Can anyone confirm if this repost is at least better than before? I'm sure not the best it can be but at least a step in the right direction?
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[arash_hazeghi]

Hi Bruce,

The repost went in the wrong direction, it got too contrasty and the red channel in the chest area is blown (notice the solid red area with no detail) it also got grainy as a result of too much sharpening.

I did look at your RAW, the main issue is that the RAW is not all that sharp (I think it's coming from the lens ) and it's a bit underexposed, sharpening it unfortunately makes it too noisy so this one has not much room for improvement. Hopefully you can get a sharper one next time and do watch for exposure.

Hope this helps :)

Arash

[Bruce Spell]

Thanks again everyone for the helpful critique and to Arash for taking the time to look at the RAW file. I do see that I went a bit heavy on the 2nd repost but I think it was because I wasn't sure just how the image was showing up to everyone else so I "over cooked" it. Here's my last attempt at a final repost. I can see the bird's lower right was underexposed (and I tried to lift the shadows a little) so there's no detail there. It is what it is and I guess this one's not worth the effort I've been putting into it. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to shoot these guys here in the southwest, lol.

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