Common Coot

[Rene' Villela]

Good morning everyone. The thumbnails are back! Great! Thank you guys working hard to make it work!

This shot is from yesterday. First time I see these creatures so I thought I should post it here. Nothing great, just new for me! I had a very hard time trying to exposed the body well without blowing the HL on the beak. Suggestions are welcome! Thank you for your time!

D300 - AF-S 300 f/4, AP wide open, 1/250 sec, ISO 200, EV +0.3

[Daniel Cadieux]

Very nice exposure on the blacks, and the good news is that it looks like there is data to be unlocked in the hot (but not blown) whites. Selective darkening of the shield and bill using QM, or using the burn tool (about 8-10% opacity) should do the trick. In-camera what works for me in a situation like this is exposing for the whites and letting fill-flash do its work on the blacks. Composition-wise you could crop from above to just below the dark blotches, and then some off the right to give it more of a pleasing balance. Otherwise very good! Love the low-ish angle, and overall angle of the subject.

[Rene' Villela]

Thank you Daniel! Since I am in my office I only have time for the cropping! :) The low angle, well, there was a 3 feet net around this pond. It goes around the 2 square miles pond but I found a whole where I was able to get the lens. I didn't have much play to move the lens around so I had to wait patiently until a bird came into my view finder. The good thing was there were hundreds of so many kinds! Thanks!

[Fabs Forns]

Great critique by Daniel and excellent repost, love the water colors.

[John Ippolito]

Very nice Rene'. Daniel's critique will put you on the money. The blacks are very detailed, and I like the great red eye.

[Tony Whitehead]

Artie's linear burn trick works fantastically for coot shields and bills. Select the bill with colour range - copy to a new layer then change the blend mode to linear burn and back the opacity off to taste - this version is at 40% but often less is all it needs

[John Ippolito]

Your repost looks perfect from here Tony! Nice job.

[Stu Bowie]

Excellent exposure on the blacks, and Tony's repost on the bill works very well. Overall, you still captured a great image Rene.

[Arthur Morris]

Great work above by all. Thanks gang. One note: I have some great coot images where I ran two 100% Linear Burns on the white bill--the bill wound up looking like ivory!

[Rene' Villela]

Tony, Linear burn? :) I'll get there soon! So far it seems you did a good job fixing it!

One thing I didn't mentioned was that I retouched the BG with PS. Arthur Morris sent me his DBF technics and so far I am learning to use the cloning tool on PS the way it should be done.
You guys didn't say any about the BG which means I did a decent job. There was a swans but in front of the coot. if you can see the reflection on the water (left lower corner) is still there. I just noticed that! Little by little I will get to the rest of the technics.

Thank you for all your comments and advices! Cheers!

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Rene, You are getting it. Linear Burn will be in the next update of Digital Basics but there is a thread on it in Educational Resources.