Red redux

[Mack Hicks]

Vermillion flycatcher, same bird as yesterday. A little better head angle than yesterday's post. RED and appreciated all of your comments. I read Juan's blogs about toning down the red channel. What I found was that I was able to recover the details in the blown reds by working in the HSL portion of LR3 and varying the saturation and luminosity. Decreasing the luminosity seemed to bring out the detail better. I also found that converting back to sRGB from Adobe causes you to loose some of the detail I had regained, so I had to further reduce the luminosity. Working on this did show me the relationship of the controls in LR3 and ACR 5.4.

D300 500 f/4 AFS I + TC1.7
1/200 f/6.7 ISO 800
SB600 -0.7 on flash bracket, tripod and gimbal

PP in LR3, changed WB from auto to cloudy, adjusted reds in HSL, also toned down the orange change a bit, lightly sharped and cropped. I did lighten and sharpen the eye selectively before exporting to CS4. In CS4, cloned out a branch or two, adjusted levels and curves, the sharpened, resized and sharpened again USM. The details in the crown look much better to me. Let me know what you think. Hopefully, this little fellow will be around for me to practice on for a while.

missing photo

[Vinay Lakshman]

Love the colours of the bird . The subject is soft , may be the AF point was near the wing end . The BG is uniform but has noticeable noise .

[Wheeler McDougal Jr.]

On my monitor the reds especially in the crown are completely blown out. So very saturated, but a beautiful bird. I have only seen one once in Big Bend NP.

[Bruce Enns]

Hi Mack, Beautiful bird. The reds, on my monitor are not completely blown out, but do look over-saturated. I see a fair bit of noise and some cloning artifacts in the BG. The D300 is not a noisy camera, and certainly your gear is capable of creating some very crisp shots, but to me this one looks a little soft, perhaps over-processed. Is this a substantial crop?

Cheers!
Bruce

[Mack Hicks]

Thanks Bruce. This is not a heavy crop, image size after crop was roughly 3500 by 2800 pixels, about 20 -25%. The saturation and luminosity were both reduced. I do have a problem getting the sharpening right. All the images in this series, several hundred, all have loss of detail in the reds from what I was seeing in the viewfinder and I was almost at minimal focus range. Next time I can find this little fellow on his perch, I will try my D700 set at camera neutral and lose the TC 1.7

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Mack, I like the pose and the head angle but color-wise this image has been butchered :) Sorry to be so blunt but no other way to say it. They are mega-oversaturated. And the selection of the head feathers was also butchered. I am not sure what folks are seeing but...

[Arthur Morris]

ps: I should have added that you can get tons of help on dealing with REDs in the REDucation thread in the Educational Resources Forum.

[Mack Hicks]

Artie, I don't mind the bluntness, as I am trying to learn. I read both the articles in the education forum, and just reducing the saturation toned down the red but did not seem to help with definition, especially in the crown, so I adjusted the luminance slider and it helped some with the definition but at a price of not looking natural. I have a several more images from this session, that I am going to start from scratch and keep reading and working on this one. I have your books and just got a book on CS4 for nature photographers that seems more helpful and logical. I also read your article on sharpness and feel like that my technique is probably not optimal and the 1.7 TC probably amplifies it as I have gone back over a lot of images with that lens combination and most are a little soft. Thanks for taking time to look and comment. On a lighter note, we surgeons in the US are quite sensitive about the term butcher and its derivatives unlike our colleagues in the UK.