Great Blue building Nest

[kevin Hice]

I have had a hard time in post edit I think it needs to be lighter.Used DPP and kept getting a lot of noise maybe was introducing it in shadow slider not sure. canon 5d mark 11 400 iso 2500 f13 photoshop crop. venice rookery

[Don Lacy]

Hi Kevin, I agree that the mid tones need to be brighter and the image needs just a touch more sharpening, I pulled it into PS and brighten the mids with a simple curve adjustment by grabbing the the middle of the line and pulling it up a tad. I then added some midtone contrast by using un sharp mask at 10,60,0 and I finished the image off by selectively sharpening the bright areas of the herons only using a layer mask. If you want you can send me the Raw file and I will work on it from the conversion forward and repost here with the steps and settings I used just PM me and I will send you my email address. I like the landing pose and I think you picked a good place to crop the bottom heron which can be very trickey.

[Diane Miller]

You caught great action here! It looks sharp but Don has made a good point about just a bit of brightness. You might get some improvement in tonalities (highlight and shadow detail) in RAW conversion or with Nik's Detail Extractor if you can't get enough in RAW.

The crop feels tight to me but I don't know what was in the original that was distracting.

I felt it had a slight magenta color cast and pulled it into PS where I see you don't have an embedded profile, which will cause it to be seen very incorrectly by some browsers. See my sticky at the top of this forum. It is apparently in sRGB but that's only the first of two important steps.

But here's the color cast neutralized --- don't know how dramatically it will show up -- it was subtle. I also did a Shadows-Highlights adjustment, which is a poor substitute for doing the same thing tn RAW. I may have gone too far, just to show what can be brought out.

It's a very nice image, worth working on!

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

Beautiful and well captured! The PS experts are undoubtedly going to help you get the most out of this! :5

[Randall Farhy]

Agree, this is a nice capture. There is a lot of detail that can be brought out in this image at the conversion level. I ran this through several filters (custom topaz pre-sets), I was quite surprised at how much is actually in there given the size of the posted file. Most of the presets exaggerated or introduced noise and large HDR type halos. This was the lesser of the bunch, Lighten mode (to emphasize shadow areas) 90% opacity. I can only imagine what a seasoned expert can pull from the original file without making it look garish.

[Diane Miller]

Any adjustment I know about will bring out noise when you lighten shadow areas. The noise it there, you just don't see it until you lighten. That's what is behind the ideas of expose to the right (without blowing out highlights beyond recovery) and keeping the ISO low -- but those two things compromise depth of field and shutter speed. This is a frustrating business.

Being from the film generation, I don't mind a little noise if it's a necessary compromise. (Has anyone ever tried to shoot film at ASA 3200?) At some balance point it's better than motion blur, although there seem to be some filters coming along that can help the latter to some degree.

[Sandy Witvoet]

Wonderful action/interaction image here! I think Diane did a lovely job of bringing just enough detail out from under the wings... also eliminating the slight magenta cast.
Great capture, Kevin!

[kevin Hice]

Thanks Diane for all the help its been slow learning post edit .I read your article on color management very good. I
think it will help

[kevin Hice]

Thanks so much Tobie the post edit i think is the hardest.

[kevin Hice]

Thanks sandy everyone on here is so helpful.

[kevin Hice]

Thanks Randall for the help makes it easier to have someone show you the ropes Very much appreciated.

[Don Lacy]

Here is my conversion from the Raw file Kevin sent me, when I first saw the image Kevin posted I suspected the Raw was underexposed and sure enough when I open the Raw file in ACR the image was about a stop and a half underexposed. So I corrected that by adjusting the exposure slider to +1.3, I also set the clarity slider to 20 and the vibrance slider to 14.On the sharpening tab I left all the sliders at their default settings except the masking slider which i moved to 53 which applied the sharpening only to bright areas of the Herons( The way to use this slider is to hold down the option key at least on a Mac and move the slider to the right, as you move the slider you will see areas of the image turning black these areas are being masked out and no sharpening will be applied to those areas). Now if the image had been properly exposed I would have used the shadow slider to open up the underside of the wings to show more detail there but with the image underexposed all that did was enhanced the noise so I left those areas dark. Once I opened the image in PS I applied a round of NR using Niks Define and painted it in of the underside of the wings, I then used a curve adjustment to ad a tiny bit of contrast by using the medium contrast setting and using the opacity slider to fine tune it. After resizing it to 1200 pixels I used the smart sharpen filter on a layer with the following setting, amount 43 and radius .4 and painted it in on the bright areas of the Herons. Kevin has said he was having trouble processing this image and the reason for that was the underexposure at the time of capture and underscore the importance of getting the exposure right at the time of capture, and while you can fix exposure issues in post it will limit what you can do with the image and it will rarely reach the quality of an image that was exposed properly. I would like to ad one caveat I recently had my iMac serviced and I forgot to tell them not to upgrade my OS to Maverick so when I got it back of course it had Maverick installed and now none of my drivers for my calibration puck work so I am kind of processing in the dark on a uncalibrated monitor so I hope the image looks okay when it comes to brightness and color.
One more thought the other images posted that have the underside of the wings lighten have way to much noise in them for my taste and if you ran NR on them to remove it you will then have bright wings with no detail where viewers would be looking for detail by leaving them dark you can hide the noise in that areas since the viewer will not be looking for detail and their eyes will settle on the brighter areas of the image.

[Diane Miller]

Looks excellent! And I'm surprised you could salvage that much underexposure.

Have a wonderful time with Mavericks...

[kevin Hice]

Thanks so much Don for taking the time to work on this. I have learned a lot When i was at Venice shootingI would have a heron fly across the water and then a white egret.Sometimes the heron would be exposed correctly but when the egret would fly up off the water it would be overexposed and I would get the highlites . My thinking was to underexpose the pics and take care in post edit.I didn't realise that by underexposing that i would be adding noise. sometimes the action would be so quick that i a dark back ground and white background wasnt fast enough to go between the two. The other problem was when i would expose to the right on the egret and have good exposures when the next egret would hit the sun at a different angle i would get the highlites so my reason for under exposing was to be able to catch both with out worring about blowing out the whites and I also took my iso to low sometimes. All about experiences . Thanks again Don and Diane

[Don Lacy]

Kevin, In that situation shooting in manual with the correct exposure would have rendered all your subjects correctly. By correct exposure I mean the correct exposure to render a mid tone subject as mid tone I would not be using ETTR.