Fish Owl

[susanschermer]

On a recent trip to India, Bandhavgarh Refuge. This wonderful owl was in terrible light. Eyes adjusted for red-eye.
Mark III, focal length 560 (400do + 1.4)
F 8, 1/250, EC+2/3, flash full power.

[Kim Rollins]

Susan -

Lucky you to go capture this one. :)
Terrible light or not I think you did well and the eye adjustment was well done too.

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I see you have CS4 so... you might try this to see what you think. It will just take you a minute or so.

Load image to CS4 - Duplicate image and work on duplicate.
From layers panel - Adjustment layer Curves>'Auto' on this one should do it
From layers panel - Adjustment layer Exposure set (approximate #s) Exp. +0.19 offset +0.028 gamma 1.05
See how that looks - Save to Psd file 'copy' with layers in case you wish to come back and play with those #s.)

Final sharpening USM for image size (two parts)
With top layer activated us Keyboard shortcut (long one) Ctrl+ALT+shift+E and this will give you a new layer that is a combination of active one plus all below it (this is an alternative to flattening at this point and duplicating a flattened layer).
You can name this new layer if you wish 'Sharp1' or ??. Run USM on this layer to settings 500/0.20/0, this will look to sharp as it brings light pixels up but you will work that out in next steps. Now with the sharpened layer active keyboaerd 'CTRL+J' duplicates this sharpened layer.
Change blend mode to Sharp1 tokeyboard darken and blend mode to duplicate of of that layer "sharp2" to lighten. I think dark pixel sharpening will be fine but you can turn the sharpened layer off and on individually to see. Activate 'lighten pixel sharpened layer' "Sharp2" and reduce opacity of sharpening on light pixels to around 35%.

Make sure all layers turned on and if that looks OK you can save to .jpg.

As I was not there and have not seen the owl except images I really don't know if this will improve this image. If you run these steps then se what you think about the changes & you can work variation of the setting above easily too.

I think you have a 'Keeper' here.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great find and details. I would lower the color temperature, give it more room top and bottom and increase contrast a few points.

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

Nice recovery with this Owl Susan. I concur with Axel re punch a bit more contrast and you're in business. Well done, habitat is great too! :)