Setting a Mood

I had this image of two Canada geese, side by side and really liked the repeating pattern of their necks and body structures. I decided to try to take it from the sunny, average day that I originally photographed it on and change the mood up without going overboard.

First thing I did was clone out the large clumps of grass and anything that was distracting to my eye in the BG. Next, I cloned the one bill from the back bird onto the front bird so both birds would have a bill entirely out of the grass.

After that, I did a levels adjustment, bringing the whitest tones up a bit and then I did a black & white gradient over the top at 43% to give the image a more muted tone.

Next was a selective color layer to soften the yellows a bit and bring them back to more of a wheat color and the last layer was a black fill layer over the top that I masked off at different opacities so more was left at the top of the frame and just a bit around the other edges. All of it was erased from the bottom edge and then I blended it darker as I went up the frame.

Final step was to sharpen the entire image to get the birds in focus and then I did a gaussian blur at 4.0 pixels over the top - again, masking it off around the birds in the FG and leaving it to diffuse the BG a bit more.

Here is the finished image and I'll post the SOOC image below so you can compare the two.

How would you do it differently? What do you like/not like about the PS work in this image?

Here's the SOOC image:

Julie, just a couple of things come to mind. I would maybe crop a wee bit off the top and add a little canvas (content aware) to the right, as it feels a bit cramped there. I would take a light pass with the dodge tool on the back feathers to bring out just a bit more detail. Also, I'm not sure the black fill burn around the edges works to my eye - it doesn't stand out enough from the grass to look like an effect. :)

Julie,
I prefer the warmth of the original and the head and neck position of the tweaked version.
IMO a little more room at the bottom would make this even stronger.
James

Julie, Great way to think OOTB -sometimes just a few different tweaks is all an image needs-Agree w/ color tones on first are nicer-Great looking birds!!

I like the original also, the warmth is more attractive IMO.

Thanks everyone. I agree that the SOOC image has better tones - I'll more than likely use that as a final image but I wanted to experiment and see if I could alter the "feel" by using some pp techniques and I must have succeeded because you all do see a difference! Now I just need to learn how to make the changes positive instead of negative!

Thanks for all your feedback - this was a fun experiment.