Crash landing whooper

[Iain Barker]

Lots of Whooper swans around at my local reserve at the moment.
They usually make a fairly graceful landing but sometimes the youngsters get it very wrong.

Nikon D7000 300mm F4 AF. ISO 800 1/1000 sec F4.

WB, crop, levels and sharpening in Lightroom.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Iain, great splash from the touch down, and I like the curved neck in the landing pose. The only change I would do is remove the tiny brown spot in the middle at top.

[Arthur Morris]

HI Ian, Love the splashdown pose, all the splashing, and especially the cocked head. The dark line behind the bird's far-wing is problematic. And the whites on the far upperwing surface look detail-less at best, blown out at worst. What were the RGB numbers for the brightest WHITEs as you were converting the image? Let me know if you need help on recovering the WHITEs during conversion.

[Iain Barker]

Thanks Stuart and Arthur.
The Dark line is the wake from one of the parent birds landing behind. It can be difficult trying to isolate a bird at this location as there are so may birds. The dark spot Stuart mentions is the reflection of another bird. I should easily be able to clone that spot though.
The whites are definitely not blown the RGB values are all around 230 (92%) and were slightly lower on the original raw. Any help you can give me on recovering the whites would be greatly appreciated. At the moment my biggest difficulty in processing is getting the detail out of the whites and the darks.

Iain

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Ian, You might try lightening the whole image and then selectively applying a Linear Burn (or NIK Detail Extractor) to the upperwing WHITEs only. There is a great thread in the Educational Resources forum on dealing with hot WHITEs. If you cannot find it, let me know.

[Iain Barker]

Thanks Arthur I will try the linear burn and read the thread.
There was quite a distance between me and the subject and I wonder if the main cause of the loss of detail in the whites is just not enough pixels on the subject.

[Arthur Morris]

Could be :) Let me know if you need any additional help. Are you good with Layer Masks?