I went threw some tutorials on Photoshop. Pretty interesting stuff.
Raw denoised in PS-5 only. Sharpened a little. Had to recover some in some blown highlights in feathers.
PS-5, Made a copy added a mask to the copy. De-noised photo. Brought back detail with brush 100% and 50% on whites and edges.
The back of the head was dark so I brightened it only. Sharpened the eye, bill and top of the head.
Used the new content aware tool in PS-5 to remove a few sticks in the way.
Comments appreciated.
Gary, it looks good! Nice work in PS, and keep practicing with it!
- It looks like the focus point was on the back, which is sharper than the eye. I would consider less sharpening on the back and leaving the face and eyes as is.
- Here's a neat trick (that I think would work well here) to help unify the background:
* add a new blank layer
* choose the brush tool (B) and change the opacity to ~8% (give or take a bit). Make the brush big enough to cover about 10% of the background. Set the hardness to 0%.
* hold down the alt key and pick a color from the background. In this case, I would pick a darker green to use to paint over the lighter highlights.
* paint over the background a couple of times. It won't look like much of a difference, but then go ahead and disable the layer to see the difference (click on the eye next to the layer to disable and enable).
Let me know if you try that out. :) It's a also a neat way to reduce the noise a bit from the bg, although you don't need that here.
Gary, I am by no means a photoshop expert, so I can't say much about that. You certainly had a most difficult situation with that background. The bird is quite pretty and with the predominant colors in him, I just don't feel that the background colors are complimentary, but rather, they clash with the bird, to my eye. Is there any chance that you could spend more time with this beautiful bird and try and get him in front of a cleaner, prettier background?
Beautiful bird indeed, and a great head turn it gave you. Nice colours and I like that there is a bit of iridescence to the plumage. The BG, although representative of this KF's habitat, is a bit dominant with the bright streaks and highlights. Getting it in front of a more distant BG would help render it smoother...I know, easier said then done!
Thnk's Daniel,Grace, Miguel. I agree the background is not very good.
What do you think about this? I changed the whole background.
Comments appreciated.
Last edited by Gary Kinard; 10-23-2012 at 11:28 PM.
White throated Kingfisher
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