Rose-breasted Grosbeak

[Bill Dix]

Woodland birds are an ongoing struggle for me, what with the forest clutter, the varied lighting and the small, flighty birds. This male Rose-breasted Grosbeak obliged by landing on an open (albeit a little large) perch in a partially sunny spot. It looks as if he spilled the raspberry sauce down the front of his dress shirt. I lowered the contrast to counteract the somewhat harsh light on him, which may also have affected the sharpness of the detail.

D7200, 500f4 + 1.4 TC, ISO 800, 1/1000 @ f/7.1 manual.

[Karl Egressy]

Very nice pose captured, Bill. This guy is a poser, and has a beautiful song but many times stays high up in the canopy.

[Fernando Cerra]

Nice capture under such difficult conditions

[Raymond Barlow]

Wonderful shot, but as mentioned, the perch is a bit heavy., well done. I do also like the composition.

[Mark Dumbleton]

Lovely image Bill. My only nit here would be the slight banding in the background?
Not sure if it's just my monitor but it may be because of gaussian blur to the background? Please let me know if it's not that.

Again, a wonderful image!

[Bill Dix]

Lovely image Bill. My only nit here would be the slight banding in the background?
Not sure if it's just my monitor but it may be because of gaussian blur to the background? Please let me know if it's not that.

Again, a wonderful image!

Thanks Mark. Yes, I noticed that posterization. I did some cloning to even out the highlights and shadows in the bg. I don't remember applying a Gaussian blur, but it's possible I did. In any case it's not your monitor.

[Alan Murphy]

You did well with the conditions you had Bill.

[William Dickson]

Great capture Bill under those conditions. I like the contrast of colours on the bird, with lovely details. Good work

Will

[Geoffrey Montagu]

Nice work, Bill. Good of him to land in the open.




Geoffrey

[Daniel Cadieux]

These guys really are beautiful...you exposed it right and rendered the "rose" colouring nicely. I like the vertical comp, and the sweet BG looks great (save for the posterization that I too see). I do wish this fella had not tilted its head away a bit though.

[Diane Miller]

Beautiful bird! The posterization may be from conversion to an 8 bit JPEG. Did you do much tonal adjustment in raw conversion? Did you go into PS for significant tonal adjustments, and if so, with a 16 bit image? Staying in a high bit workspace gives you more tonal overhead for adjustments without posterization.

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

The shooting angle is a little steep and there is not a lot of feather detail.
Must be hard conditions to shoot in.

[Bill Dix]

Beautiful bird! The posterization may be from conversion to an 8 bit JPEG. Did you do much tonal adjustment in raw conversion? Did you go into PS for significant tonal adjustments, and if so, with a 16 bit image? Staying in a high bit workspace gives you more tonal overhead for adjustments without posterization.

Hi Diane. I did only a minor adjustment in RAW conversion, but did some work on the bg in PS, 16-bit, before converting final TIFF to 8-bit JPEG. I've had the same issue on several images recently, most noticeably ones like this in the woods with dark background where I did some smoothing out of shadows and highlights. I guess I need to minimize the PP work in situations like this.

[Diane Miller]

Posterization happens more often than we want in dark tones. There just aren't enough tonal levels there to stretch them much. Frustrating. About all you can do is bring images into PS as 16 bits and minimize adjustments in dark areas.

A couple of good links:

http://ronbigelow.com/articles/posterization/posterization.htm

http://jimmodell.blogspot.com/2015/04/posterization-rough-techniques-for-reducing-banding-in-photoshop.html

[Bill Dix]

Diane, Thanks for the information and the useful links. I read both of them, and tried the method proposed in the first: adding noise to the banded dark areas. I did this to the TIFF on which I had already done a fair amount of manipulation to the dark background. I added 2% noise (Gaussian, monochromatic), which hid the banding but created a bothersome noise. I'm not sure which was worse. Then I went back to my files and worked on a different frame which is presented here. In this one I did just a bit of global Highlight Protection in RAW conversion, and then worked a little on the bird in PS 16-bit (some highlight and shadow corrections and a little Topaz Detail) before resizing and converting to jpeg and sharpening. I did absolutely nothing to the background in PS. I may still be seeing just a hint of banding; I'd like to know what you see. But the message is, as you said, try to avoid manipulating the dark backgrounds.

[Diane Miller]

I don't see banding in this one, but I just got up and still on the first cup of coffee... Some monitors will show more banding than others, too.

Nice shot, good pose and tonalities well handled. The whites look a bit hot, compared to the first, but the histogram shows them in to 230s. Maybe try for a little more detail there? You might consider cropping from the top, which could remove most of the diagonal branch in the UL. Keep this version for a magazine cover, though!

[Bill Dix]

Thank Diane. I appreciate your help. Of course I design all of my images as magazine covers; it just hasn't happened yet. :w3