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I was lying down in the sand photographing this nearly fledged American Oystercatcher. All of a sudden, it jumped right out of my frame. I SO wish that I had a tad more space on the right, but I still like this image. It's full frame.
Canon 1D4, Canon 400 F.6 & 1.4
F10, 1/800sec, ISO 500, manual mode
Handheld down in the sand
C & C always welcomed and much appreciated.
Love the background and exposure. I too would like more room to the right.
This is OOTB, you can make it happen here:w3.
Hi, Marina, I love the composition. You could still add canvas on the right to make it really, really nice:S3:
Thank you, Cheryl. My concern was that I would have to fix the tail which I am not very good at. I guess I could give it the ol' college try.
Love the moment captured, and the BG is beautiful. If you have other shots perhaps you can use part of the tail for that image.
Just a tweak of cloning would do it -- seriously, give it a try.
Here's a trick for filling in the added canvas -- take the marquee tool and copy a piece of sky from the left. Cmd-J will put it on a new layer. Then move it to the new blank area (hold Shift to keep it from moving up/down) and zoom in to 100% to get the edge to match with no overlap, so you don't cut off even more of the poor bird. Then do a Curves adjustment layer and clip it to the new sky layer, which lets you tweak only that layer so you get a good match. (Usually possible.)
If that's not good enough, move a much larger piece of sky to overlap the bird hugely, then add a mask (icon at bottom of Layers panel) and use the black brush to bring the area around the bird back, and then use a very large, soft brush to feather out the left edge of the new sky so it blends with the existing one. (You may need to get it close with a Curve first.)
Then make a composite layer above all for any final cloning of the tail.) (Cmd-Alt-Shift-E.)
I have quite a few shots like this! Need to work on my reaction time or find slower birds.
+1 on the right.
Very nice colors - simple composition. You could crop lower to capture just the legs/feet for a different look.
I gave it a try -- didn't need to patch, you just barely caught it all. Take away your black border and you only have to worry about filling in the BG. Here's the result and I'll post the Layers panel in the next frame. I did have to select a large portion, about 3/4 of the area to the left of the bird, to get a good blend, and do a little curve tweaking on both that layer and the BG to get a good match. Hope the Layers panel is self-explanatory. It was a fun exercise! Thanks for posting the image!
And here's the Layers panel. I was sloppy around the tail, where I didn't get the best match on the two skies, working with a mouse on my laptop instead of my usual Wacom tablet.
The clone touchup was to remove a trace of your black border.
Thank you so much, Diane. It sure looks a lot better. I have no trouble adding canvas but not with an object this close to the edge. I am embarrassed to tell you that when I look at your layers panel, I am lost. My PS skills are actually quite basic. I will try to take a stab at it in the next few days and will let you know how I do. Thank you so much for your efforts.
Believe it or not, I am happy with this frame and find it far more thought provoking than having the entire bird in the frame.
very neat image, love the title it fits. Overall just love it.
Diane makes it sound so simple doesn't she.....LOL
I'm glad I'm not the only one lost..... I read her instructions and go, really you can do that.... hmmm
I do like her RP very much all the way around, this way you can almost feel the lift off with the tail involved.
Special shot, these feet just don't look like they could be real, so manicured.
For anyone very new to PS, it would take a long time to explain all the steps from A to Z, and to explain the principles behind them. That's too much for a reply here. But it could be food for thought to someone who has just a little experience -- a challenge to learn and understand some basics, and then once you understand them you have some very major tools that are good for a lot more than altering this shot in this way. I use these tools almost daily, for much more subtle adjustments.
If it's too much for now, it's valuable to at least have some idea that certain things CAN be done -- details to be learned later, one at a time.
Here are the basic principles used in this image to add sky on the right.
1) The Layers panel is where we can see and manage layers. They show as a stack with the Background layer on the bottom.
2) There are two kinds of layers that we commonly use for images – pixel layers, which contain image elements, and adjustment layers, which affect their appearance, something like filters on a lens. Visualize them as flat pieces of a picture (pixel layers) or filters (adjustment layers), stacked on top of one another.
3) The Background layer is a pixel layer, and you can have other pixel layers above it. When desired, they can contain an element that doesn’t fill the whole image, such as a bird added to a sky. This element may be copied from any pixel layer in the image or from another image. It can also be an empty layer, which you create by clicking the icon at the bottom of the Layers panel just left of the trashcan icon. An empty layer is sometimes created to contain elements cloned from another layer (or another image).
4) You make an adjustment layer above a pixel layer to affect its tonal or color appearance.
5) If there are several layers below an adjustment layer, it will affect the image as though all the layers below were flattened.
6) If you want the adjustment layer to affect only the pixel layer immediately below it, you can CLIP it to that layer by clicking the leftmost icon at the bottom of its adjustment panel. (Toggle to unclip.) There is no need to clip an adjustment layer to the Background layer as it is the only layer beneath the adjustment layer.
7) You can mask parts of either kind of layer to hide parts of it. You can also remove parts of it with the Eraser tool but that isn’t reversible. Use the black brush (the regular brush with the Foreground color set to black at the bottom of the Tool panel) to hide the layer and the white brush to reveal areas that were hidden. A mask on a layer is completely editable (tweakable) next week or next year.
8) An adjustment layer comes with a mask.
9) A pixel layer doesn’t come with a mask but you can add one by clicking the third icon from the left at the bottom of the Layers panel.
10) One layer is always selected (active) and it is the one that will be affected by whatever you do, or it is the one above which a new layer will go.
11) When you have pixel layers or masked adjustment layers it is possible to move them (slide them around) with the Move tool. It is easy to do this inadvertently if you have the Move tool selected and drag the cursor over the image with one of these layers being the active one. (If an adjustment layer doesn’t have anything on its mask, there is nothing to move.) You can prevent this by LINKING these layers to the Background, which can’t be moved.
If there is any interest I could do a slightly more organized tutorial in ETL.
OMG Diane. Now that you have done this for me, I am actually going to have to go in and try it! I'll let you know as soon as I get a chance.
Just love people that are able to go through things step by step..... I'm also trying one tonight in PS elements.
Thanks to Marina for the image posted and enabling a learning topic.
Report back....
Reporting back. I totally winged it and it took me about 30 unpleasant minutes. PS and I are not the best of friends. Thanks for all the help and feedback everyone!
Looks good to me! Hopefully over time you can become better friends with PS :S3:!
Ditto to Nancy. Like that it is "offcenter" too.
Excellent!!! PS is worth becoming friends with. It's so common (well, for me) to just clip a wingtip of a bird in flight, or not have enough canvas on one edge. And it always happens to the best image otherwise.
very nice. I'm still working on instructions and becoming friends with any software program.
none of them do what my head wants. I have this problem with books too, can't write one as they are never what is in my head.
Can't get my photos how they are in my head...... so I completely understand your 30 minutes of basic torture. I literally do 8 hours sometimes until my eyes are going to fall out of my head.
I always love it too when you just get used to something, and they upgrade and you have to learn all over.
Hi, Diane, thanks SOOO MUCH for the detailed lesson in PS. I think layers are very hard to master because I don't find them very intuitive and I personally would love to see a tutorial! Your repost was great and Marina, so was yours:S3:
Dianne,
Thanks for taking the time to lay this out so clearly.
