Breeding colours

[prasanna av]

Indian pond heron in breeding plumage.
f 8, 1/5000, ISO 800, -0.7 ev.
Light was on the harsher side.
Critics and comments are very welcome.
Regards
Prasanna

[prasanna av]

I wonder why nobody has commented! !! Is something grossly
Wrong with my picture??

[Marina Scarr]

I am so sorry that I missed this image, Prasanna. I just went through all the images to see which ones had a low comment count so that I could comment and came across yours.

Lovely portrait of a pretty good looking bird although his beak looks pretty mangled. The bird is either beginning to lose its breeding colors or it has been been feeding its young. You have nice details in your feathers and sharpness throughoug. I feel as though the image is quite bright and was taken in high light. I think the image could stand to have the brightness brought down a bit. While I love your background colors, I feel they are competing with the colors of your bird. So in this case, I think your bird would have shown up even better against a darker background (BG.)

Thanks for posting and looking forward to the next image.

[Satish Ranadive]

Beautiful portrait.Very nice colors and composition.Agree with Marina about BG.

Regards,
Satish.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Prasanna, as you mentioned, the light was harsh, but you have done well with the detail and sharpness. As Marina stated, the beak has lost a bit of his breeding colours, but still showing enough. As the light is harsh, I would try and tone down the image, and maybe desaturate the yellows in the BG. I know its not always ideal to shoot early or late, so sometimes we have to take what we can.

[arash_hazeghi]

nice portrait, good HA. it looks a bit oversharpened to me. good comments above, the main issue here is the harsh light and the busy BG as noted by Marina and Stu. Next time try to photograph a bit later when the light is more pleasant.

TFS keep them coming!

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Nothing grossly wrong at all Prasanna and I've been there myself where I got no or next to no comments and wondered the same. I think people are just busy these days with the springtime weather but still no excuse. I think all the above comments are relevant and personally I do like the colors of the bg with this bird. Your detail is great and as Arash has said try shooting early morning or late afternoon. It makes a huge difference. Thanks for sharing

[Don Lacy]

Hi Prasanna, You have a beautiful subject here and while the light is a bit harsh it can be mitigated to some extent in PS using layers and mask. I used three separate curve layers to tone down the mid tones and highlights and a curve layer and mask to even out the brighter areas on the bird. For the BG I used a saturation layer with mask to tone down the yellows as Stu suggested and a brightness layer and mask to bring it further under control. Like Arash I feel the image is slightly over sharpen and I was also wondering did you blur the BG in post. Also one last thing the image as posted did not a color space assigned to it which can cause problems with viewers depending on what browser they are using here is a post on how to down size and prepare an image for the web. http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...izing-an-image

[prasanna av]

Thanks a lot Dan,
Thanks a lot for sharing the workflow.
It looks a lot better now.
Being very new to PP and PS in particular, I have a lot to learn in this forum.
Thanks a lot again to Marina, Arash, Cheryl, Stuart and satish for valuable inputs.
regards
Prasanna