Double Crested Cormorant Portrait

[garyyoss]

This shot taken at Wakodahatchee Wetlands with a Nikon D300, Nikkor 300 f/4 and 1.4x TC
420mm F/5.6 1/125s -0.3ev

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Gary Good looking bird in breeding plumage Probably a female !!!! Excellent head angle and exposure Got the bg very nice for a smooth look I like it a lot !!!!

I like the PS work Excellent image !!!!

[garyyoss]

Thanks Al, I appreciate your kind comments.
I'm still working on the Lightroom and CS3 adjustments, Do they have Lightroom and CS3 for Dummies? That's the book I need!
See you soon,
Gary

[Gus Cobos]

Gary,
Big Congrats on your nice capture, Love the background, nice colors and details on your subject....oh, and yes those eyes...:D:D:D
WAY TO GO PARTNER...:)

[Alfred Forns]

Gary if you start out with a good image the PS work needed is minimal

For getting a good grasp on the workflow try Arites PDF file Digital Basics All is spelled out and laid out very easy to follow !!! I take under two minutes for my posted images !!!

[Oscar Zangroniz]

Beautiful portrait all aroud.
Congrats!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Harold Davis]

sweet job, gary. did you try bumping the contrast a couple of points just to see what it looked like?

[Nonda Surratt]

Love that eye! Super job! Sort of wondering about what Harold said about the contrast?

[Leroy Laverman]

Classic portrait Gary. I really like the composition and the bird is very nice.

The blacks are a little washed out. Here's what I did in my edit.

1) In curves I used two control points one with an input of 63 and an output of 50 (this darkens the blacks) and another with an input of 193 and an output of 196 (to keep the bright portions bright). This 'S' shaped curve does two things. It increases contrast as well as saturation.
2) I wanted the eye and beak to pop a bit more so I increased the saturation by +10 points.
3) Lastly to bring down the highlights I did the following. Go to the select menu and choose "color range". Then from the pulldown list choose "highlights". Click OK. Now feather this selection by 60 then copy and paste it to a new layer. Lastly change the overlay mode from normal to "multiply". This last step is useful on a wide range of images. especially for adding contrast to the highlights in white birds like egrets. When working with full size images you will need to increase the feather radius quite a bit (100-300 depending on the effect you want). If the overlay gives you too much darkening of highlights you can change the opacity of this layer to fine tune the effect.