Ring-necked Duck (drake)

[Joseph Przybyla]

I captured this image of an Ring-necked Duck at Lake Mirror in Lakeland, Florida. Comments and critique welcomed and appreciated. Thank you for viewing.

Nikon D7000
Nikon 80-400mm F/4.5-5.6 VRII AF-S ED shot at 400mm (600mm FFE)
1/1000 F/5.6 Matrix Metering +2/3 EV ISO 320 AWB
Post processed in Lightroom 6 and Photoshop Elements 10
Cropped for composition and presentation, vertical from horizontal

[Randy Stout]

Joe:

I think ring necked duck drakes are very handsome, and you have a nice down the barrel pose here with good eye contact.

The darker areas are areas are not showing a lot of detail. They technically aren't blocked up, but close.

In the repost I cropped a bit tighter, ran a screen blend mode at low opacity on the duck only via a luminosity mask, and then used some a selective soft light blend mode to add back a little snap to the darker details. Sounds like a lot of steps, but took about a minute.

Just a option to give him a little more detail.

Cheers

Randy

[adrian dancy]

The crop by Randy is better. it would be nice to see this reworked. Have you done some dodging to brighten the blacks?

[Diane Miller]

A very nice pose captured here. Good suggestion by Randy. Should be easy to get this much detail in the darks in LR (or ACR) by balancing the Shadows and Blacks sliders on the raw file.

I might do a little more of a crop from the top and bottom.