What are they doing?

[Tommy Rodgers]

Canon iD Mark IV,700mm, ISO 800, 500 mm f/4 +1 .4x, 1/400 f 5.6, evaluated metering +1/3, AP, 60% crop. Usually tonal work in PS, but I use Nik Define on the noise and Topaz Focus on the sharpening. I thought I would give each of those companies a try. Any opinions about which is the best?

It's 8:00 PM, and the Alaskan Sun is still very bright. Puffins are returning from an ocean excursion, and the traffic pattern was very full. Usually, someone had to leave to make room for a new arrival. One side of the rocky island rookery was in the bright sun, well lighting the Puffins from the side and the other side was in deep shadows. Due to high tide, the small landing area for the boat did not leave much room for positioning. With so many opportunities, I tried to get the best light angle on both the lighted and shadow side of the beach. Way too big a job for the newbie. All I did was confuse myself and get the camera settings mixed-up.

This group of five arrived one at a time and began, what I think, was a mating ritual. Before they broke up, they had "clicked" beaks several times and ruffled one another's tail feathers with their beak. I have not seen this type of behavior before and would appreciate someone filling in the blanks for me. It was a fun day for Puffin photography.

[Jim Fenton]

Pissa rocks, lichens, mosses and colors.

Great and interesting activity with the birds and I like the crop which inludes a whole lot of the neat habitat.

The birds are presenting with a bluish / cyan color cast, no doubt due to the reflection of the substrate. I think you could warm the image up a bit overall and take care of that and it would also pop more of the reds in the rocks as well?

Perhaps a yellow filter applied lightly in PS would do the trick??

[Arthur Morris]

Yes to neat setting and behavior. The birds are most likely courting but it is possible that these are just social interactions, i.e. greetings.

The huge problem with the image from here is that the birds simply do not look sharp... What are others seeing?

[noelle zaleski]

Not sure about the behavior, I would have love to have seen this in person!

I agree with Artie, the birds are not sharp.

They sure are cute :S3:

[Daniel Cadieux]

The focus looks good, but as stated the birds are not as sharp as they should be...to me it looks like their may be resizing compression going on thus the apparent softness. Tommy, did you have difficulty getting the image down to below 200kb ?

Neat scene, I like the behaviour and interactions going cool. Cool setting too.

[Tommy Rodgers]

Thanks all for the helpful comments. Nothing gets you up the learning curve faster than a hand up from your contemporaries. First, I have been successful at lower the blue cast by reducing the blue saturation in a Hue/Saturation layer. Before a repost, I have been working on the sharpness of the image but without much luck. David you may have hit on the issue, because I can successfully sharper the image before sizing for posting but after sizing the image the sharpening is not successful. By listening to Artie, you, and others on BPN, I have learned to sharpen after sizing but with this image the compression seems to prevent successful sharpening. Frankly, I am in way over my head on trying to explain why, but I am listening with both ears.:S3:

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks all for the helpful comments. Nothing gets you up the learning curve faster than a hand up from your contemporaries. First, I have been successful at lower the blue cast by reducing the blue saturation in a Hue/Saturation layer. Before a repost, I have been working on the sharpness of the image but without much luck. David you may have hit on the issue, because I can successfully sharper the image before sizing for posting but after sizing the image the sharpening is not successful. By listening to Artie, you, and others on BPN, I have learned to sharpen after sizing but with this image the compression seems to prevent successful sharpening. Frankly, I am in way over my head on trying to explain why, but I am listening with both ears.:S3:

Just for the record books, all of my images are reduced to <20kb (during save for web as detailed in Digital Basics) and I have never once had an issue with the images look unsharp due to compression....

[Tommy Rodgers]

Thanks again for all the help.

First the blue cast: I decreased blue saturation amount in a hue/saturation layer.

Sharping: Another round of sharping in Topaz InFocuse.

The blue cast is mostly our of there. I believe the image is slightly sharper, but perhaps the best fix is for me to do a better job of focusing in the field. As aforesaid, things were really popping. I tried to do too much too quick. It took me too long to stop "spraying and praying" and start thinking about what would make a good image under the circumstances. I know that has never happened to any of you, but for this rookie that many Puffins got me excited.:S3:

[Arthur Morris]

Tommy, Much better on the sharpness. The WHITEs however are a problem. I am cutting, pasting, and adapting stuff from here (http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/88451-The-hand-off) as it applies directly to this image.

It looks to me as if the WHITEs in the image are toasted....

Well, I was wrong, however.... There are a lot of over-exposed pixels in the image but this is a case where the WHITE bellies of the puffins are over-exposed and mostly without detail but the highlight warnings do not show. This is usually caused by false Recovery during conversion....

You start with an over-exposed image with detail-less WHITEs. You move the Recovery slider well to the right while holding the ALT key. All of the flashing spots indicating over-exposed highlights disappear but, and this is a huge but, the WHITEs are still detail-less.... Not sure why that happens sometimes and not at other times but I do know that the WHITEs in both the original and the repost are beyond burned, over-exposed, detail-less white enamel.... Not sure why everyone else ignored it.

[Tommy Rodgers]

Thanks Artie. Back to the drawing board.:S3:

[Arthur Morris]

YAW. At worst, be sure to bring the RAW file to Homer.