Wild Dog

[Ken Watkins]

Taken in Kwando Concession, Northern Botswana 29th July 2007

EOS 1d Mk11

500m, hand-held

F4,1/500, ISO800

Please excuse the out of focus grass on left any ideas as to how it could be removed or improved?

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Ken

Evicting the grass is not that difficult Best to use a quick mask and clean up with a little cone stamp Might want to look at Robert O'toole for his CD Will work wonders !!

For these type images with strong back light you need to use lots of flash to fill in Exposure wise it is a little over and might be able to bring back the sides Besides the grass I did a duplicate layer and multiplied then brought the opacity down a bit btw love them ears !!!!

[Arthur Morris]

Excellent job by Alfred and a wonderful subject but when you work sidelit in bright sun you and the image are pretty close to dead...

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Ken,
Re-work did improve but too many things working against you #1 being the lighting mentioned above by Artie. The bright line at top is not helping either. that's too bad as the translucency of the ears really show through and the in your face pose is very exciting!

[Ken Watkins]

I agree with all of the above, unfortunately you do not get many chances to take pictures of wild dog pups at their den, nor were the trees very co-operative in obtaining a good vehicle position, but I am not giving up.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Excellent job by Alfred and a wonderful subject but when you work sidelit in bright sun you and the image are pretty close to dead...

Love the quote from Artie. Yes, bright side light is really killing. However, when one comes across a hard to find subject, you will have to do what ever is possible. Keep on trying and keep on sharing.

[Robert Amoruso]

Ken,

I took Alfred's repost and did the following:

1) Reverse S-Curve using a Curves Adjustment Layer.
2) Threshold Adjustment placing the slider at 210. Using the magic wand with continuous "off", selected the white. This gives you a selection of the highlights.
3) Delete Threshold adjustment and create a BG copy with the selection still active.
4) Refine the selection with a large expansion 40 pixels and feathering 30 pixels.
5) Use the Shadow/Highlight adjustment and play around the the highlights slider to bring back details. I went as high as 60 here.
6) Create a Selective Color adjustment and add 10% black to black channel and 5% black to neutral channel. THis helps to remove the flatness the reverse s-curve caused.

It looks better and doing this on a TIFF and tweaking around will be better then my fast JPG work.