Looking for A Handout

[Paul Lagasi]

Took this while out for a walk today, it was looking for a few seeds, cleaned up background with CS.
D70
Sigma 70-200 @ 200mm
F5.6 1/500 +0.7 EV

[John Cooper]

Hi Paul, quite a cute looking bird - do you know what species it is? The bird is a bit soft and would benefit from a bit more sharpening. Black eyes set in a black face nearly always disappear unless you can get some natural light reflection or use a fill-flash. As for the composition I would add some extra canvas on the right side to give the bird more space to look into. If this tends to centre the bird too much you could crop some from the left side.

[Manos Papadomanolakis]

Agree with John,very nice comments!

[Paul Lagasi]

Thanks John, its one of our most common birds a Black-Capped Chickadee. I will try what you suggest..and post later

[Axel Hildebrandt]

John made some good suggestions. I would add the whites look a bit blue. If the oriiginal is RAW you could go back to raise the color temperature and apply some S/H to get more details in the whites and blacks.

[Paul Lagasi]

Made the changes, tried to get rid of the blue tinge, but not sure what S/H is? Saturation/Hue? Quite a bit to learn...lovin it..thanks
Might have to calibrate monitor to match your settings on website, slight difference from what I sent.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

The composition of the repost looks much better. Sorry about being unclear, S/H stand for the shadow/highlight tool in Photoshop or alternatively, curves. The whites look overexposed and the background has some artifacts. You could try to blur it using Gaussian Blur at 2 or 4 pixels.

[Arthur Morris]

I like both of them but actually prefer the color balance in the original. It looks to me as if a slight CCW rotation would help a bit. You can learn how to set the defaults and make adjustments SH/H adjustments in Digital Basics. (That plus the rest of my digital workflow).

later and love, artie

[Jody Melanson]

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/255431476_w9cyy-O-1.jpg

Quick description of what I did:

Selected the highlights, pasted to a new layer with CTRL + J. Changed new layer blend mode to multiply to tone down the whites. Selected the blacks on his head with a quick mask and used the quick mask on a brightness/contrast layer to bring out some detail in the blacks...

[Travis Novitsky]

Its hard to decide, but I think I like your fist composition a little better. The only thing that bugs me is the whites on the bird appear to be over-exposed. This is a difficult bird to shoot (in my experience) because of their fast movement, and difficult to get a good exposure because of the coloring of the birds.