A Deer Reflection

[jeannette Duncan]

This photo was taken at the Modoc County Wildlife Refuge. It was dusk and the photo was rather dark. I did some work on it with CS3 to lighten it up, and added a border. I used Kodak EasyShare P712 on Auto. Thank You for your time to critique.

jeannette

[Carl Krucke]

You did a pretty good job lightening this Jeannette, given what it sounds like you started with. Looks like you might have been pretty far away too. Tough conditions! One thing you might chose to do with it is to rotate the whole thing a little bit clockwise to level it out and compensate for the camera have been a little tilted. With reflections like this, using photoshop it's very easy to tell if you were tilted, you can drag a vertical guide line from the side and bring it up to the tip of the nose (or some other point). If the nose of the reflection is just touching the line too, you know the shot is level.
Keep shooting!

[Alfred Forns]

Great suggestion for the vertical Carl !!! For reflections is the most accurate

For the vertical guide you can go to the measure tool (lives with the eyedropper tool) and draw a line from one eye to the other or along what you think is horizontal If you make a mistake start again (re sets)

When you are satisfied go to Image> rotate canvas> arbitrary and it will give you the deviation Just say yes and the image will be straight !!!!!

For your image I would suggest starting out with as close as a perfect exp as you can Under those situations you need to add light Check your histogram and have data on the right side

One cool thing you can do for that image is go for the reflection only !!!!!

[George DeCamp]

Hi jeannette!

Very good shot, love the reflection and mood you captured. You have a good eye so lets work with it. The advice Carl gave you is right on, I can also add a thing or two. First next time make your image 750px instead of the size you have to make the details show up nicer. I think your image may look better without that forest on top. Try to move your image in this post up and down with the slider on the right of your computer screen right now and position it so you crop off that different color top and just leave the grasses...looks better no? Next time also if you can try and get the deer while it is facing towards you, I know not easy. :)

You could repost this if you like with some changes and lets see how you do!!