Speaking of Leopards. . .

[Edward Arthur]

143836

Taken recently in the wild late afternoon
200mm f/5.6 1/100 ISO 320
Shot raw, everything manual including focus and HH

Tweaked in LR for highlights/shadows/blacks
Topaz Remask/Adjust to uplift subject and knock down BG
Guassian blur in PS for BG
Smart sharpening on subject layer

My problem is I think the whites may be too hot. Couldn't figure out how to fix that. Apart from other issues, what are your opinions?

Thanks. :)

[Diane Miller]

Wonderful catch!! Great pose and sharpness!

Whites are hot. Could you bring them down any more in LR? That's the place to try. I often need to lower Exposure when whites are hot even after full movement of the Highlights slider. Then bring up Shadows. Reduce Contrast if all else fails.

You don't say what the camera was. I hate it when I blow out highlights, and I do it more than I'd like to admit.

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Edward - Looks like an older powerful leopard with lots of character in the face. Nice pose and pov. Unfortunately, I agree with you and some of the highlights on the face are blown. It looks like the light was already harsh. I took your image into PS to see if a luminosity mask would help. While it tames the highlights a bit, there is no detail there to recover. PS also shows the aperture as being f1.4 not 5.6 but it does look like you have more dof. There's some blue coming through in places and I would look to reduce that and perhaps the reds a bit. How big a crop is this? Do you have more room above, it feels a little tight there? Finally, I would back off on the sharpening slightly but you did get good sharpness at a slow ss hh.

I think the problems here were more in the field than in pp with the sunlit portions being overexposed.

I hope you have more from your safari and will share them. Btw where were you on safari?

TFS,
Rachel

[Edward Arthur]

Thanks so much for feedback! It really helps.

The shot was taken at Mala Mala, a private game reserve in South Africa outside Kruger. We scrambled to a site along the Sand River where this leopard had just taken down an antelope and dragged it up a tree. In the photo, he had come down from the tree a few hours later to rest on the flat ground in the shade and digest his meal. It was a bright day so there was lots of dappled sunlight under the trees and bushes and that was the culprit in this shot.

Diane, body was a Canon 6D -- forgot to mention that. My typical starting point in LR is to move the highlight slider all the way left and the shadows slider all the way right, then tweak the blacks until I see some pop and definition. I go on from there, usually never touching contrast/saturation. So, no, there are no more highlights left to knock down. I might try contrast this time, though. I like the shot and would like to make a print of it.

Hi Rachel, I admire your work and appreciate your input and analysis. Not a huge crop but I have canvas to work with to air-out the shot a bit. Don't believe all the EXIF data in the photo. I shot this with an older Zeiss lens with no electronics and the chip on the adapter records f/1.4 by default. It was really f/5.6. Besides Mala Mala, we spent time in Botswana at Savuti Camp and Duba Plains in the Okavango Delta.

[Diane Miller]

I can't criticize that processing, Edward. With Shadows full to the right, there wouldn't be any leeway to lower exposure to try to pull out more from the highlights. Just a bad light situation. The image is dramatic enough that the highlight issue is really minor.

Lowering contrast might help a little. And Nik's Detail Extractor (in Color Efex Pro) can often give some added detail in highlights and shadows. It's worth a try here, but you might want to mask it off the BG -- just a casual mask would do.

[Edward Arthur]

Ignore this post. Couldn't delete the test image.

[Gerald Kelberg]

Perhaps you could try doing your conversion with Canon's DPP - the brightness adjustment may be more sympathetic than in Lightroom and allow you to recover the hot areas.

Gerald

[Edward Arthur]

Thanks, Gerald. I'm not adept at DPP but I tried. There are a couple places that show 255 (totally blown) around the chin and left of the eyes. The PS burn tool just makes it a mushy gray at best. So, it is what it is.

Guess I'll have to go back to Africa and try again. How bad can that be? :)

[Gerald Kelberg]

Hi Edward. You have the ultimate answer, but there may still be some relatively easy ways to rescue this image.

Artie and Arash have a guide to DPP that you will probably find very helpful - $20.00 or so, well spent.

I would expect that you should be able to recover at least some of the over exposure by bringing down the 'Brightness Adjustment' in DPP. Maybe if that makes the rest of the image too dark, you could do two conversions and work the relevant bits together in PS. Personally, I almost never use the burn tool except with the very lightest touch. It doesn't work to recover detail.

But you can still go back to Africa, as well!

Gerald