Reticulated Giraffe Portrait

[Loi Nguyen]

Took this image just after sunrise on my last day in Kenya. I wish we had spent more time with these guys as they are really quite beautiful. One evening coming back from a game drive, we saw as many as 30 of them in a large herd, but it was too dark to get any decent pictures.

1DX
500f4 II
1/1000
f5.6
ISO-800
Handheld

Full frame
Saturation 10
Vibrance 10
Ran Field Blur since the BG was quite busy.
UMS 120/0.3/0

Appreciate your comments.

Thank you

Loi

[Brendon Cremer]

Hi Loi, this is a nice portrait of a giraffe, unfortunately it has a few issues, the reds / oranges look a little over saturated on the giraffe. The giraffe also has a pretty bad halo right around from the blur added to the bg, image almost looks like the giraffe was pasted onto the bg. Sorry for the negative feed back but we never pointed these things out we would never grow.

[Loi Nguyen]

Hi Brendon, thank you for being honest. It was indeed an bad post. I started from scratch here and checked the WB with neutral grey, not added saturation, and not used the field blur. It was something new I tried for the first time. In the process, I also discovered that I had blown the whites.

so, here is a repost
Reduced exposure by -0.6EV in LR4
Used Highlight slider to recover the whites
Clarity 10
Vibrance 10
Exported to CS6
Check WB
NR to BG
Checked Levels, set Mid Level to 110
Added Contrast with Curves
Selective Sharpening UMS 120/0.3/0

Not a good image, but I think better than the OP.

Appreciate your comments as always.

Loi

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Loi - the rp looks better. Here the variation between the heavy shadow and the brighter areas make it a bit more difficult to pp. It's easy to overdo adjustments and to overuse new tools as we learn about them. When it comes to pp, my mantra is "less is more".

TFS,
Rachel

[Russell Johnson]

Loi - I think that the RP had taken this image in the right direction.

Certainly one for the collection, as I am yet to see the reticulated giraffe.

[edwardselfe]

Hi Loi - I like this and it's a beautiful creature. I personally don't much like the effect that the clarity slider gives (although I concede that it's useful in a few cases) and I think the effect of that at +10 is showing in this image. Would love to see one of these special giants one day.

Ed

[Morkel Erasmus]

I always like seeing these guys as they differ from our variety of giraffe. Nice pose and light - always tricky to make giraffe portraits.
Brendon touched on some of the main issues I had. I almost always (99.99%) of the time dislike additional blurring added to images as it's almost never done subtly enough. :e3
When using the clarity slider, I try to restrict it to a value of 20 or less, and I always try and actually drop clarity on the BG down to about -30 and paint clarity back on the subject using the brush in LR.

[Gregor Bergquist]

Hi Loi

Well, RP much better. And a good post as we here learn new stuff. I did just reading the posts above. BG too messy for me.

TFS / Gregor