Beaver Out of Water

[Jared Gricoskie]

Doing some pre-workshop scouting we found a very photo friendly beaver on the flanks of Rocky Mountain National Park. The light was fading fast and the shutter speeds were dropping but I liked the feel of the evening light, showing the beavers cerpuscular behavior.

D300, 500mm f4 +1.4 tc, f6.3 1/125 ISO 400

[Robert Amoruso]

Jared,

Good detail in the beaver - I like his wet look. Though you get separation of the log over him, it merges in the reflection. I find the horizontal log a distraction but as you said he is cooperative, you should have more opportunities with him.

To me the image is a bit high in contrast and over saturated.

I did two things in the repost, one was a reverse s-curve to lower contrast (more here: http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=20434). Then I reduced saturation of the green channel as well as the master channel.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Jared,
Good that you have found a friendly one. I agree about reducing the saturation. I would also crop a little bit from the top to remove the few stones.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Arthur Morris]

Excellent repost by Robert. Now take out some BLUE and some CYAN. I like it but for the big branch.....

[Robert Amoruso]

Not sure what happened Artie as I did remove the cyan and blue color cast. Looking in the directory I save reposts too and notice I had two versions. This is the one that should have gotten posted above.

[Arthur Morris]

Mucho bueno RJ.

[Jared Gricoskie]

Robert,

I can appreciate your color correction, but I have to attest that my original post's color represented reality. The sky was a deep blue with cloudy diffusion, right after a rain creating the blue on the tail, the wet back, and the log. The light saturated the greens and blues in an interesting Velvia kind of way.

So my question is what takes precidence, reality, or trying to color correct to what people think would be correct?

[Arthur Morris]

With all due respect Jared, the colors in your original post are not at all natural. The original image has a big color cast. And lastly, again with all due respect, it does not represent reality. A beaver's tail is brown not blue.

I gladly ask others to chip in here.

[Marc Mol]

An interesting image here, open for discussion.
Does one exhibit the image as was seen with the climate conditions at the time or use color correction to show what should be?
Hmmm..................I'm not sure?

[Jared Gricoskie]

I went back to the original raw file, in lightroom adjusted just the exposure, then white balanced off of the grey area below the nose around the mouth's upper lip, that tells me there isn't a massive blue color cast on the whole image. The tail is still blue, due to the reflected blue grey sky. The tail naturally is shiny black and scaly, once wet it reflected the sky giving it a blue color.

I think I may have an issue with CS3's Save for Web, did this jpeg straight out of lightroom without any saturation adjustment, when I do it in CS3 everything gets more saturated. I have all the color profiles set to sRGB in CS3.

[Harshad Barve]

My vote for color corrected repost , I wonder how many of us post images without corrections
Nice shot
Harshad

[Robert Amoruso]

Artie - fully agree. I struggled with the tail as well, it is blue. I tried to re-PP but couldn't find the path. Robert did.

I forgot to mention that I used selected color to remore cyan and blue from the image to do this.

[Robert Amoruso]

Robert,

I can appreciate your color correction, but I have to attest that my original post's color represented reality. The sky was a deep blue with cloudy diffusion, right after a rain creating the blue on the tail, the wet back, and the log. The light saturated the greens and blues in an interesting Velvia kind of way.

So my question is what takes precedence, reality, or trying to color correct to what people think would be correct?


Jared,

You pose an interesting question I have thought about for a day or so before responding.

I do agree, under the conditions you spoke of, the saturated colors (greens in the grass) and the overcast (blues in the beaver), skewing of colors does occur. When I photograph forested scenes in such conditions, I many times accept the oversaturation of the greens as I like the look and know that the increased intensity is an accepted norm as this is what we expect under such circumstances when we view an image of such a scene.

Being in Florida, I create many images of alligators, mostly in water as that is how I like to see them and a lot in shade as that helps to reduce specular highlights. This normally makes the gator look blue due to the shade/overcast. I happen to like the blue and do not color correct such images if leaving it along works towards my creative expression for the image. I have posted an example of what I mean. The gator's head is quite blue as is the water. We expect the water to be but not the gator. When I correct the blue cast, it is a very different image so I chose not to. I choose to challenge my audience to accept this look of the gator. This image happens to be one of my best selling image - upwards of 40 prints sold to date - so it does appeal to people.

When I critiqued your image I viewed it as a pleasing wildlife image of an interesting looking beaver - wet from his environment and ready to re-enter that environment, the water. Though the grass' saturation may be accurate I found it distracting as it was not the center of interest of the photograph, the beaver is. The green grass competes with the beaver for the audience's attention. Unlike in a forest scene where the patterns and colors are many times the center or interest.

I find the blue color cast of the beaver as distracting as it does not meet my expectation of what a beaver's coat would look like. When we as humans view scenes in the environment, our brains interpret what we see. We see the saturated green grass, we see the beaver in shade and cast in blue, but the brain will interpret those things based on what it knows of the subject and its life experiences.

I look at that scene in the wild knowing what a beaver should look like, I know it is the center of interest and I barely notice the saturated greens. I accept and look by the blue cast of the beaver to enjoy the creature.

I then see the image, colors accentuated by the camera and perhaps again during post-processing (especially in PS Save for Web). What is my expectation of the scene and that is how I critiqued it. I did not see a reason for not correcting the color skewing.

In my gator image, only the head is visible - not a untypical view of a gator. Leaving the head blue combined with the leaf that floated into the scene better expressed the creative statement I wished to make for the image. To be sure when I have posted this image I have been told how to color correct it.

Getting back to your question, what takes precedence? Your creative expression and your audience's expectations. Both combine to make an image successful. You as the photographer can only decide how to interpret that scene and how you feel you need to "correct" things with it to aid in the audience's interpretation of your intent.

[Robert Amoruso]

I went back to the original raw file, in lightroom adjusted just the exposure, then white balanced off of the grey area below the nose around the mouth's upper lip, that tells me there isn't a massive blue color cast on the whole image. The tail is still blue, due to the reflected blue grey sky. The tail naturally is shiny black and scaly, once wet it reflected the sky giving it a blue color.

I think I may have an issue with CS3's Save for Web, did this jpeg straight out of lightroom without any saturation adjustment, when I do it in CS3 everything gets more saturated. I have all the color profiles set to sRGB in CS3.

I see Save for Web got you. I will de-saturate an image before using Save for Web to compensate for this.