Yellow Billed Kite

[Ken Watkins]

Taken in Deception Valley, Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswansa, 3rd March 2009 (FULL FRAME)

EOS 1D MkIII

500mm F4 IS hand-held

F8, 1/320, ISO 800, EV +1/3rd

[Juan Aragonés]

Superdetailed portrait Ken. very sharp, with a nice light and a fantastic BG. The image looks very light to my taste and, in fact, the histogram is very adjusted to the right side. You have some free room in the left side of the histogram and that means that you can move the dark and/or grey slide to the left for a darker result.
I really like this portrait. Very good job!

[Ken Watkins]

Thanks for your kind comments, can I ask how you open this file and view such things as the histogram?

[Juan Aragonés]

Ken I downloaded your image to my hard disk and I opened in photoshop to evaluate the processing and to have a look to the levels because it is not possible to rely in what I see in my uncalibrated monitor at the office. Having a look at the histogram in Photoshop it is possible to see a lot of information about the exposure job of an image and it is essential to take into consideration that information for an optimal processing job.

1) I clik on the B/W circle icon in the bottom of the layer panel to create a new adjustment layer (click on the “umbral” option that it is located between “invert” and “posterize”)
2) if you move the slider to the right or to the left you can determine the range of information that it is really useful for your processing job.

[Juan Aragonés]

With this action, I decided tht the more important information of the image is located between the level 38 and 250 and I use that information to adjust the levels.

[Juan Aragonés]

Now you can open the levels adjustment pannel and type the values 38 and 250 in the small boxes (oops I typed a wrong value, 35, in the attachment) and that is all.

Hope this help :)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great portrait and great explanation by Juan. It does look a bit bright on my monitor, too. Midtones and contrast adjustment might help with that, too.

[Ken Watkins]

Juan,

Thanks for the detailed information, I would never have found out about this as readily any where else.

Here is the result which looks remarkably better, thanks a lot.

Ken

[Juan Aragonés]

Ken I am glad to hear that :-)