Juvenile White Ibis Preening

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Sony A-700 Tamron 200-500mm @500mm 1/1600sec F6.3 ISO200 9:30AM July12, 2008

RAW was slightly underexposed. The background seems a little noisy. The image originally horizontal. Cropped only the right and left, none at top or bottom. ~onlybill

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the preening pose and soft light. The bird looks a bit soft on my monitor, maybe another round of sharpening and you could give it more room.

[carole wiley]

Love the pose! Image seems a bit flat on my monitor and a bit soft. Would like to see it with a bit more room on the left.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Nice preening pose and good exposure. I agree about it being a little soft and a bit more canvas on the right and left. Many thanks for sharing.

[Petros Petrou]

Nice image. Good exposure and soft light. I agree that a little more sharpening would be good. You may also try to increase saturation to give some pop to the image colors.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

I really appreciate all comments. I did several things, as per suggestions, and a few more that occurred to me. 1) I increased the crop on the left (Carole), which turned out to show a ring shaped wave in the water. I increased the saturation (Petros). Now here is what else I did, and I'm not sure this is the correct method, but I'm learning. I created another layer, to which I erased about the top 1/3 of the background. I feathered the selection. I used a stamp clone brush to remove the bird from the bottom layer,(when I use blur on such a background without removing at least the edges of the bird, there is a sort of color bleed that shows). I then applied a motion blur to the entire bottom layer(seemed to work better here than another blur method). I worked on the top layer with dodge and burn tools to bring out some feather detail. I then re-sampled down to web size, and used USM on the top layer. Then I flattened the image and saved it as a jpeg. Other ideas on how I should have done this would be welcomed, or any other comments or criticism on this second version~onlybill

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Image wasn't included in last post?