California Brown Pelican

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Another image from my San Diego Trip.

This image was taken in La Jolla Cove, San Diego.

Nikon D500, 500 mm f/4
ISO 800, f/4, 1/1600 sec
Manual Metering, AV mode, +1 2/3 Exposure Compensation


Comments and Critiques are welcome.

Thanks for watching.

[arash_hazeghi]

nice pose and colors, some of the head whites are hot, I'd then it down. i like the weathered beak.

TFS

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi Krishna , a nice simple frame of the pelican .Good posing and no distracting elements .
Sharp where where it counts , overall i think a bit too saturated for my taste and the contrast is a bit too strong IMHO . I do agree with Arash regarding the whites .

TFS Andreas

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Hi Arash,

Thank you for the comments. Can you help me what exactly you meant when you said whites are too hot.

Are we saying that the white balance is off ?

Thanks
Krishna

[Isaac Grant]

Agree the pose is nice but I wish you had a lower angle to shoot at so you were not shooting down on the bird. I'm not familiar with the west coast pelicans so can't speak for the colors. Whites too hot means that they are over exposed. You have lost the fine feather details in the head because the whites are over exposed. Lowering your highlights may help. You could also try a little Detail Extractor on the whites to see if you can get some details back. Can also try to select the whites, open a separate layer and then lowering the opacity of that layer to the 10-20% area. Then burn the whites a few times to tone them down. People recommend a 30% hardness on your soft brush. Be careful not to turn the whites yellow. It is best to import the file into PS with the whites as close as possible to where you want them to be so they do not turn yellow or gray due to processing. In the Canon software I can lower the hightlights as much as -5 and be good when I convert to TIFF. Not familiar with Nikon version or sure what you use to process your RAW files.

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Thank you for the info provided. I will take care one whites going forward