Overcast but colorful at the shore...

[David Roach]

EOS R6 RF 100-500 @363 f6.3 1/4000 ISO 800 HH, Manual mode, FF

[dankearl]

Nice Full frame portrait. Seems it should be sharper...

[Paul Burdett]

Not much not to like here David, but yes to a sharper eye. The focus seems to be just to the left and below the eye. Love the softness of the feathering behind the crown and the head area. BG compliments nicely.

[David Roach]

Nice Full frame portrait. Seems it should be sharper...

Hi Dan and Paul and thanks as always for very valued comments and help. This is the raw in DPP with no processing showing the focus box (thin red square). The orange means close to overexposure and blue same for underexposure in DPP (not sure this is standard for all raw converters). You can see the texture around the eye and the lore is smoother than the lower mandible which could be why it's perceived as sharper but if you look at the feathers right to the left they are sharp from base to tip. This combined with my preference to sharpen lightly before presentation could be what is skewing the perception. It is a narrow DOF and I purposely did not stop down (to say f8) to get more in sharp focus as I like the focus falloff (or fallon?) to lead the viewer to the eye. Just a personal preference. Thanks again for your always valued inputs. Please keep them coming.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi David, very nice indeed, like the framing and shallow DoF.

Perhaps a bit too dark and saturated for my tastes, but still a nice portrait. The OP is sharp, confirmed by the Raw, it's purely down to your sharpening regime/workflow, this is where the issue lies, some additional sharpening applied to the OP takes it to where it needs to be, that simple. :w3

TFS
Steve

[Dorian Anderson]

Very nice. I echo the others re: eye sharpness. Only other suggestion would have been to close down to f/8 or even f/9 to get more of the bird in focus. You had tons of light and could have easily gotten away with 1/2000 or 1/1600 on a static shot.

[Joseph Przybyla]

Hi David, really nice pelican portrait. I love the colors of the bird and the background works well. I know from the 1:1 that you posted that there is more detail that can be tweaked from the image. A step to your left would probably eliminated that birds right eye that is showing for a cleaner profile. Nice image, thank you for sharing.

[John Mack]

Everything looks great. My only suggestion would have been to stop down some. You had the shutter speed to work with.

[Brian Sump]

David, I like this one. Good lighting across the subject and even a little bkg gradient adds a touch of interest.

I hear you on the eye stuff. It does appear a little soft, then again sometimes when the iris and pupil do not have clearly defined edges it can mess with the human eye. I'm not pretending to be an expert here but can see where a subtle illusion can take place.

Still see a lot of color (chroma noise) - see all the blue and red artifacts in the matted white neck feathers? Might be something to play with if you haven't yet (there's a box to check at the bottom of the LR edit screen) and a slider in DPP on the second tab. It could help...

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi David nice portrait .
I personally quite like the saturated image here ... think you can afford more exposure .
Overall maybe a touch too blue ... but this is up to my personal taste , as well as the sharpening .

Brian is seeing " color noise " ... I would think it is fringing caused by the lens . And do not push the color noise slider too far in general as it blurs a lot of nice colors , too . Just my 2 cents ....
But for sure you can have a look in the lens correction tab ( LR or DPP) to see if it helps to remove the artifacts that are present . The " cheaper " the lens .... the more fringing one will have .

TFS Andreas