***Snowy in flight in Pink Light***

[Yves Guillot]

Here is another one from this snowy in flight in pink light.

http://www.pbase.com/image/141880665/original.jpg

Canon EOS 7D Canon IS 600 mm 1:4,0 - 1/1250s f/4.0 iso800 Full Frame

C&C : thanks !

[Marina Scarr]

Wow, Yves, chapeau bas! You did a great job with this one. The colors are just stunning!!! Is this full frame? I would love to hear others ideas on alternative crops.

Would love to see your photographs presented in a larger format. You are allowed up to 1024 pixels on the long side and 250KB.

[Yves Guillot]

http://www.pbase.com/image/141883830/original.jpg

To answer to Marina's request : here is a repost at 1024.

Actually it is a little bit more than full frame because I had to add a little bit of canvas on the left side in order to complete the cut wing.

Hope you like it!

[arash_hazeghi]

nice eye contact and BG, as bit tight in the frame. I would reduce the blue cast on the snowy and run some NR on the BG

[Don Nelson]

I agree with Arash, but not only remove the blue from the snowy, but the magenta also.

[Yves Guillot]

Any suggestion on how to remove the different casts you are talking about? I must say that I do not see them on my computer... Also, no noise is apparent on my computer either...

[Don Nelson]

1. Is you monitor calibrated?
2. Download the free color picker tool -- http://www.iconico.com/colorpic/ Use it on the whites of the Snowy, and again on the shadowed areas -- with a white bird you'd expect both measurements to show neutral (e.g. R,G,B at almost exactly the same levels. They are not -- the whites show magenta and the shadows show heavy blue as well as some red).
3. You don't tell us the tools you have available -- I will presume photoshop. You can also measure values using the eyedropper tool.
See the JPG at the bottom? Note the 4 color color sampler tool locations numbered 1-4. Number 1 has very high R and B (magenta) in the whites, and 2-4 sample the shadowed gray areas -- with very high blue numbers. These are the color casts Arash and I mention.
4. In photoshop, if you desire to preserve the color of the sky, you'll have to do some masking. Its best done on the larger image out of the raw file. Using the smaller JPG presented here for viewing is just a little more work to make accurate. You need to be accurate - missing the mask edge leads to white edges around the bird that people then assume is some sort of sharpenig artifact.
5. Once you've masked so just the bird is selected, save the selection under Select->Save Selection. It will appear as a channel. You'll want to reuse this later while adding adjustment layers
6. Put four color sampler tool locations down in the white and the shadow areas -- they will be your references
7. Now you have several choices to remove the cast in just the bird -- Using the bird's selected area from channels (ctrl-click on the channel for pc users) you can add an adjustment layer for Hue/saturation, or selective color. Adjust the sliders to make R == G == B in the 4 locations.
Note that photoshop has many ways to do a task -- there are other ways but these are the simplest ways I have found.
8. If you have Nik->Color Efex Pro 4, an alternate way to do this is with white neutralizer, and then masking the results with your bird selection channel. That should get you close. An alternative is using viveza2 with some control points, but you'll still want to do a mask of the bird as I have found that slightly modifies the sky next to the bird.109716

[Don Nelson]

And after making a crude selection, and adding an area under the wing and above the bird to show effects of bad masking....
and removing black from magnenta, red, and blue in selective color, the result is gray for the otherwise white bird....I applied a bit of removal of black from the whites as well. You can see how red/magenta the whites of the bird and how blue the shadows of the bird were.....for a bird that is essentially black and white (with some brown in some of the darker spots on some birds).


I prefer using the hue/saturation as this provides an additional control for lightening the resulting gray from each of the colors, rather than also removing black from the whites and grays in the selective color adjustment layer....

Some people may also use colored filters. There are many ways to solve this problem.

Note the results of inexact masking -- the bulges into the sky were deliberate. You can see they are gray rather than white. But note also where the bird wasn't masked well in the shadows -- a border of blue remains. And I've taken the opportunity to bump up the colors of the eye. The bird still is awfully gray and requires more work to get rid of this once the color cast is gone
109717

[arash_hazeghi]

Don nicely covered everything!!!

[allanrube]

Good tutorial.

The capture of the owl is one of the best I have seen of a snowy. It really captures "quiet" and "peaceful."

[Yves Guillot]

Thanks for this tutorial Don! I do have PS5 and nik filters. I used white neutralizer (but I do not master it though) on it maybe twice. My monitor is «calibrated» in the sense that I can see all of the whites strips below the screen here. I used Spyder 3 to calibrate it once some 2 years ago and gave up the updating procedure. It did not change anything anyway to my screen except maybe lowering the whites.

I can see the casts you were talking about but I am really not sure I will go through all this : it seems quite complicated. I might give it a try though even if I do not really like the B&W effect you get on the snowy in the end process. It is really not the memory I have about its true colors in the field.

More over, all this is quite technical and it is ok to master it (I try to also) but beyond that aspect, the aethetic value of the picture is kind of overlooked in both your comment and in Arash's comment. And for me, the main aspect of this picture is right there! The opportunity to catch a snowy in pink light is not given everyday, you certainly know that. This being said respectfully : I certainly do not want to start a fight over this.

Thank you for having taken the time to explain the techs. If I have time I will give it a try ...and repost the picture. Thank you again!

[Yves Guillot]

I am still trynig to understand all your tutorial Don!

Just wondering : by doing a mask on the bird only and using image>auto color would I get a result close to the end result according to you? This would avoid different manipulations.

Seconly, with NIk filters ( I have version 3) how do I «then masking the results with your bird selection channel»? Not sure I do understand here.

Thanks again for this whole explanation!