Common Buckeye

[Don Jacobs]

Shot this yesterday using the 1DIV, 300mm f/8.0, ISO 640, 1/800 hand held. C&C greatly appreciated.

[Mitch Haimov]

Your late-season buckeye is well-focused and nicely off center. BG colors compliment subject well. You have blown pixels in your subject and just to the right of its head:

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That can be addressed as discussed in your Gulf Fritillary thread. That would also help with the bright areas in the stems etc. BG is more cluttered than ideal, but not a lot you can do about that without meticulous masking of the subject then blurring the BG. But you could eliminate clutter from LL while further improving the comp by cropping from the bottom. In the following version I cropped from bottom, did a little image clean up to remove some flower bits from LL the crop didn't get, and painted with black at low opacity on a new layer set to Overlay blend mode to darken the bright areas:

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My clean up work and painting were of the quick and dirty variety for illustrative purposes, you could certainly do a more careful and seamless job. Also, reconverting to preserve the blown highlights will both reduce the need for painting to darken and make it more effective--can't paint back in missing detail (you'll notice painting didn't do much for the brightest areas, e.g. just to the right of head and stems below right forewing).

I hope you find these suggestions helpful. Keep at it!

[Jonathan Ashton]

Don I try not to read previous comments but in this case it was inevitable due to the repost. I think Miitch has illustrated beautifully hpw a few quick pointers can improve this lovely image. I would love to see the raw reprocessed.

[Nancy Bell]

Beautiful butterfly and very nice position to the camera with both wings open flat! Bkgd is busy but I would try to blur it a bit or reduce the impact by slightly desaturating the colors. I don't think it would be too difficult to mask the butterfly to achieve this. I use the quick mask tool in PS and touch-ups as needed. I, too, would like to see this again if you reprocess.

[Carl Walker]

Hi Don. Great shot here and really good advice and tutoring from all here. Benefits us all. TFS

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Don. I like the diagonal positioning of the butterfly which gave you a very nice pose, and you have good sharpness on your subject. My initial thought was that the whole image could be just a bit darker. Lots of detailed and helpful comments above for you to consider. I like the tweaks Mitch did in the repost. In an ideal world, I would wish that the butterfly's wings were not as tattered around the edges. A little extra post-processing work will take this strong image up a couple notches. :S3:

[Gabriela Plesea]

So beautiful, and I wonder why they call it a "common" Buckeye, there's nothing common about these lovely colourful patterns and the perfect symmetry:w3. Techs covered so well above, just wanted to congratulate you on this lovely image-well done, Don!

Kind regards,