American Avocet

[Indranil Sircar]

This was taken earlier in the week. Settings were -

40D, Sigma 50-500mm @ 226mm
1/2000 sec, f/6.3, Mode: Av, Metering: Evaluative, Exp comp: +1/3, ISO: 800

Reduced background noise, applied s/h and usm. Any feedback and comments will be appreciated...

~ Indranil

[Juan Aragonés]

Very good pose. Is this a big crop? The BG needs a round of selective noise reduction and noise is very obvious in the darke wing tips (I think it is due to some kind of shadows/highlight filetr because there is an halo around the left wing) and I miss some contrast in the image. In my repost I cleaned the noise in th BG, the haloes around the wing tips (using the stamp clone tool), and toned down the Bg a bit. hope this helps

[Juan Aragonés]

Here is a simple truck that is really helpfull to allow us to see what our naked eye can´t see in a processed image. Once you have done the job jus create an adjustment layer (brightness/contrast), play with the sliders and see whats happen...

In the file attached, I used this simple trick with your original image and with my repost togethers. As you can see it is very easy to see differences in noise, halos, cloning marks and many more things (I used the following values...brightness -39 and contrast +85). :)

[Stu Bowie]

I like the flying posture, showing the full wing spread. The detail is there, but Juan's repost has shown it up very well.

[Chris Kotze]

Super angle.detail and pose well captured. Ditto second post looks great

[Indranil Sircar]

Juan, thank you so much for showing the way to do this. I like the repost much better. I did not do a good job on the post processing.

Stuart, Chris, thanks for looking and your comments.

[Juan Aragonés]

Indranil, I am glad to hear that you have found useful my sugestions :)

[Arthur Morris]

Loverly flight pose and wonderful work and suggestions by Juan as usual. (Thank you sir!)