Variegated Fairy-wren - male

1D MKIV, 600mm f/4 L, 1.4x extender, Wimberley, Gitzo 5541LS

Cloned two tiny branches.

This is my first upload. Hopefully I went OK.

I think I need to work on my processing for uploads as there is noticeable loss in sharpness.

Beautiful colours on this fella, and the diagional perch works really well. From my own experience of putting images on the web, I can believe that this is perfectly sharp at full size.

Evolution run riot in this species! Superb bird Chris! Love the pose and look back. Fairly nice BG and the perch fits the bird. The bird looks a bit dark, and I might try blurring and evening out the tones in the BG a bit.

Regarding posting to the web, you should be able to process, resize and sharpen an image for the web that looks every bit as good as a high quality print and better than the original. The original RAW image will be inherently a little soft due to the anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor. The one caveat here is that it does seem to be possible to upload an image to BPN that is oversized and then the server takes over and resizes it before posting. The end result is not good. Your image does not look like it has been treated this way. For fun I lightened the image a bit and ran another round of sharpening. I think it responded quite well.

Could you run through your processing Chris, and we can see if there is an issue somewhere.

High John. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
My post processing is very basic at the moment. I simply imported into Aperture3 and upped the sharpness, definition and a tiny increase in saturation then converted it to a 640X640(max) jpeg.
I have recently purchased CS5 but I've only just started to have a play with it.

OK Chris, I think there might be a few issues in your processing that can be solved pretty easily. I don't use Aperture but do use Photoshop (Ps). When you start using Ps your processing may jump to a new level. There are as many ways to process digital images as there are photographers out there. I would recommend going to the Tutorials and Educational Resources forum (http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...onal-Resources) for lots of great information on this important subject. Here's what I would do in Ps for a basic processing flow (assume you shoot RAWs):

1. Bring image into Adobe Camera Raw, which is the RAW front end to Ps. Make most of your image-wide adjustments there including Crop, Exposure, colour temp, tint (for colour cast), saturation etc etc. There are many things you can do in ACR.

2. Bring into Photoshop from ACR. Deal with noise at this stage if you need to. People tend to not run NR on the subject or other important image elements with lots of detail, so mask these off before you run NR.

3. Fine tune tonality using Curves, Levels, Dodging and Burning, Saturation and other tools to show detail in highlights and shadow areas and to obtain a pleasing contrast. Run any other processing steps you need to do. Save this version as a TIFF.

4. Resample image for web. Lots of ways to do this. I use Image size in Ps. I usually present a horizontal image at 900 pixels wide by 800 or less high but you can go up to 1024 pixels wide or 800 high.

5. Sharpen subject and important image elements by masking out BG etc. View image at 100% and sharpen until you get a pleasing result- sharp but not too sharp.

6. Use Ps Save for Web and Devices to limit your file size to about 195 kb or less (200 is the BPN limit but there are bad consequences if you overshoot).

Some of these steps can be accomplished in Aperture.

Welcome Chris.
Great image and on a very cool bird. Nice look back pose, good comp, sharpnes and bg. How much did you crop? Because I would like a bit more room so you can avoid such a square crop. TFS

What a beautiful bird! I love the way he is looking back over his shoulder at the camera. This really engages the viewer.

Thanks a bunch, John. I think I'm gonna have to start using Photo shop. I'll definitely check out the tutorials.

Thanks Dawn.

Ivan, I wasn't sure about the crop. There is room to play with.

Chris, this is a truly beautiful and interesting bird. I think you'll find that the more you learn to do in CS5 the happier you'll be with your images in the long run. I always recommend "The Missing Manual for CS(version #)" as these books are very easy to follow along with when learning Photoshop. I also recommend Scott Kelby's Online training because you can take any class, any time and each one is short and to the point as well as being geared toward photographers.

Now, with your image I played a bit just to show you some easy techniques for smooting out a BG. You have got a decent BG to start with but the streaks and blobs of color were competing with the bird IMO. I selected the bird and perch and then inversed the selection. I used the eyedropper tool to choose a medium green tone and then selected the soft brush to paint over everything at about 30% opacity. This smoothes out a streaky BG in a flash. I also used the saturation adjustment layer to bring down the yellows in the greens so they weren't so predominant. Lastly, I recropped so his eye was closer to the ROT's position.

This was a very fast /half sloppy attempt just to give you an idea of what you can easily learn to do in Photoshop.

Thanks for you input, Julie. I really like the framing. Thanks for you help with sorting out the BG, I have a photo of a female with the same BG that I'd like to reprocess in CS5.
CS5 is a bit daunting.....

Thanks Chris, try adding a little bit on the top and some to the right. I wouldt try to center the head.