B&W, tinted, glowing Cranes

I shot this Crane pair at Bosque and although the birds are nice, the bg and overall setting was not doing much for me. So, I added a couple Nik and Topaz filters to it then added a color range mask, selecting some of the reds in the image, creating a "tinted" B&W.

I am still having fun processing the images from my first Bosque trip last November with Kerry Perkins! Such a great trip. Great bird photography opportunities as advertised. And it was really fun to finally meet some current and past BPN'ers!

Super depiction of the cranes! Love the softness and the blurring with the soft grays and those few well placed hits of white for a bit of definition. Having the red heads and the yellow eyes as the only colors makes this eye-catching. Those brown, stubby fields make a terrible background and this rendition makes that all go away into soft, lovely faint lines. I would consider removing those few bits of distracting reddish color coming from a branch going through the tail end of the left crane. Good dynamic poses on the birds.

Thanks, Nancy! I agree with you about the distracting color of the branch. Here's a RP with it removed. I actually did this right after I first posted and was confident that you all would agree! :-) The reddish color that is left is actually part of the bird's plumage.

Hi, Dan, I'm glad you removed the reddish branch. Did you notice the shadow on the right crane - it is a perfect duck head:S3:

Very nice!! And a great way to deal with what I imagine was a less than ideal BG.

With strong processing like this you can often do a better (less obvious) job of removing unwanted details in the original image, before processing, rather than afterward.

I like what your processing did for the birds. I did wonder if they were getting dizzy with the surrounding squiggles. :-) I'm glad you deleted the branch, but I think it wasn't completely deleted, as I still see it in the second image. I like the grey and white tones, with the little bits of color.