dragon

[stuart wanuck]

nikon d 300 iso 400
sigma 150 mm

[Diane Miller]

It looks like you got great sharpness -- I'd love to see it bigger. What would you think about taking some off the right, halfway into the leaf?

[Mitch Haimov]

I like this one, Stuart. Nice detail within your DOF, pleasing subject. I suggest cropping about half the negative space from the left, but not the right. Did you consider darkening the bright areas of the BG. Looks like could use a little NR on BG as well.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Fine focus and detail, lovely colours - is it so or is the contrast a little high - either way it works! The background is a little patchy I would blend it a little so it would not be quite so obtrusive.
You will never get all the wings in focus in shots like this, but thta is not a big deal. I suspect you have many images - do you have any with the nearest wing in focus, if so you may find the presentation improves a little. Keep 'em coming, they have almost completely disappeared in my neck of the woods.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Stuart. Very nice sharpness (within your DOF), light, and colors! As already noted above, I would suggest trying to blend the bright and dark areas of the background and also run some nr on the background. The comp works for me, but you might experiment with the cropping suggestions above for alternative presentations. Overall, this is very nicely done!

[stuart wanuck]

blend performed?

[Mitch Haimov]

I do prefer the BG in repost.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Repost better - perhaps consider desaturating a little.

[Diane Miller]

The BG is nicer with the lighter tones given a brush of green. How did you do it?

On my monitor the image is underexposed. I pulled it into PS and the histogram was almost all in the left half. I put a Curves adjustment layer on it and pulled up the center of the curve, and things looked a lot better to me. That also made the BG a little brighter again, but maybe whatever you did to it could be done again -- it worked very well.

That lightening of tones also gives an appearance of slight desaturation.

BTW -- there is no tagged profile. I assigned sRGB and the appearance didn't change, so that's what it was, just didn't get tagged. That can make it show incorrectly in some browsers.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Diane the histogram is mostly to the left this is because most of the tones are darker rather than lighter. If you press Alt when using the right slider you will see it is in fact well exposed - the highlights are at the right side. Having said that the higest highl;ights are specular and not too troublesome so a slightly brighter image does look ok.
Just as an aside if tiffs are converted to jpeg using "Save for Web" i.e. Ctrl Alt Shift S, the tiff will be converted to jpeg as srgb automatically in CS6 - (and probably CS4 onwards??) - earlier versions there is a tick box "convert to srgb". Hope this helps.

[Diane Miller]

In my CS6 the Save for Web dialog still has the same old check boxes to convert to sRGB and also to embed the profile. Those settings are sticky, but the checkboxes should still be there. I'm curious -- do some people not have those boxes?

[BillTyler]

I like the detail in the wing venation.

Bill

[Jason Stander]

Hi Stuart... excellent detail and angle... love the blended version... overall a great shot... WD!