I feel that a little flash fill would have worked wonders for this image. It is almost perfect, but for the lack of the extra punch that it would have given you in creating this.
Thanks for posting Ed. Good work capturing an elusive bird with a 400m. I would give more room on top and less room on the bottom. Anytime you have OOF FG, it is best to eliminate it in the finished image.
For post-processing, I recommend a levels adjustment to open up the tonal range and a curves adjustment to increase the contrast. A Shadow/Highlight adjustment on a background layer may be needed to open up the blacks. Those correction in PS will really make this pop.
Hi Ed. I agree that fill flash on cloudy days is a big help. However, If you took this capture in RAW format I think you still have a lot you could do in the processing. I hope you don't mind the repost after 2 minutes of PS work on your jpg file. Re-processing steps taken: Shadow and highlight tool to recover shadow detail. Sponge tool in saturation mode to apply some selective saturation. Clone tool to remove the sharpening halos.
Thanks guys. I appreciate the feedback and your efforts.
1) Re: Fill flash - sometimes we end up tricking ourselves. All morning, I had the flash and Better Beamer mounted on a bracket mounted on the camera. When we went for lunch, I broke it all down. And then after lunch, I stopped by the pond and just grabbed the camera and went out. My mind was on something else - trying to get low in order to get a better perspective - something I heard regarding earlier post here. I should have gone back for the flash but didn't. Also black and white birds have historically given me problems. I wanted to experiment. In the final analysis - no excuse.
2) Re:crop - I would have preferred to move the bird down cropping more in from and leaving more in back. However as I said in the OP, at most 5% of the pond was unfrozen and many, many ducks, gulls, geese. swans, etc. congregated aound those small openings in the ice. If I left and more background at the top there would have been parts of ducks in it. Therefore I cropped it the way I did.
3) Re: PP - I stink at it! :( Right now I am importing my RAW files into Lightroom. In Lightroom, I made a minor WB adjustment. Then I added highlights to brighten the image; added a touch of highlight recovery and made a very slight adjustment to the blacks (shadows) before importing the file as a JPEG into PS7. In PS7, I cropped and thought the blacks needed a little more work so I made an adjustment in levels. Then I sharpened and what you see is the result. Indeed, the final adjustment in Levels may have been a bit much.
Again, I really appreciate the feedback. Keep it coming. Thanks.
Hi Ed. I can see that you tried to open up the shadows in your reprocessed image, so there is better dark detail, but at the expense of noise. Saturation seems about the same. Two things I would suggest as far as post processing goes: 1) Get to CS3 from PS7 if you can as the 16bit editing tools are a big help and 2) are you working on a calibrated display?.
As far as the comp goes. If you are willing to clone, it would be relatively easy to expand the canvas above the Merganser, allowing you to crop some of the bottom.
The calibrated display point brings up an issue that seems almost to silly to mention but I keep falling prey to it. First off, the monitor on my relatively new (less than a year old) laptop PC has not been calibrated and probably should. But the other point is that the image quality seems to be dependent on the "tilt" of the laptop screen. On more occasions that I would like to admit, I will PP an image so I think it looks good and then when I post, I get comments that it is too dark. If I check it on my old (limited memory) desktop it indeed looks to dark. If I come back to the laptop and tilt the screen farther back, the image begins to looks dark as well. I can't tell you how many times I have fallen for that where I have darked am image to make it "look better" only to have it turn out too dark.
Hooded Merganser
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