Tufted duck (2) - grumpy

[Mike Hitchen]

Another of my images of the tufted duck looking a mite grumpy

ISO 1600 f8 1/640
Shadow was lifted on its face and whites on the flanks brought down. Cropped about 24%

168188

[Isaac Grant]

Been searching through thousands of Scaup all winter hoping for one of these guys in New York City, but still no luck. Nice low shooting angle you have here. Not a traditional pose but still kind of cool. Photos of black and white birds on dark water are really hard to get right, I feel photos of light birds on colorful water are the same. Somehow the water gets over or under exposed and never looks like it did in the field. I did the following to this picture to try and add a bit more pop to the bird against the dark water.

Image looked kind of flat to me so I made the water a little darker and lightened the bird a bit
lowered the exposure in the white flanks and raised the exposure of the blacks (my version has the whites too grayed out but not enough pixels there to really work on that so just left it alone. on the original that should be an easy fix)
Added a little more saturation to the whole bird
Ran Detail extractor at 25% opacity to bring out a tiny bit more details in the blacks and whites
Applied NR to water
Cropped as the bird was a little small in the frame for me.
Small amount of clockwise rotation
Applied NR to bird in a very small dose
Smart sharpened the bird at .3 and 75%

Wondering what you think? As it is not a traditional pose I thought this kind of edit put a bit more emphasis on the bird. Of course this is all better done on the original.

[Mike Hitchen]

Thank you Isaac. The day was heavily clouded which probably accounts for it being flat and darkening the water really helps. I tried bringing the whites down but started getting a blue hue so I obviously need to improve processing the whites.
Thank you for taking the time to detail the steps you did and I will certainly see what I can do from there.