Thanks for looking,
One of the four fledglings from Niagara Falls, Ontario
Canon 1Dx - 500mm F/4 IS - 1.4x
1/1600s @ F/8 - ISO 800
Mike Veltri
Peregrine Falcon
Thanks for looking,
One of the four fledglings from Niagara Falls, Ontario
Canon 1Dx - 500mm F/4 IS - 1.4x
1/1600s @ F/8 - ISO 800
Mike Veltri
Excellent top-side view, wing position & IQ. TFS
Hi Mike, a great dorsal view of the falcon, and with good DOF across the wingspan. An unusual colour to the BG - is it water or sky?
Beautiful view and detail! Not sure what color the bird should be, but I see an apparent color cast that should be as easy fix.
Great dorsal view! The young Peregrine's are still in white fur. Hopefully it's ready to fly by September.
The colours look right from my end. Nice gliding pose, I only wish the head was not slightly angled away. Glad to see the Niagara peregrines are successful this year again!
Neutralized the grays (clicking on several areas but liked one on the tail) with the gray eyedropper in Curves, then did a Hue-Sat to change the hue of the cyans.
It's not easy to get colors right with an image with subtle colors. An image with a fuller range is easier, and also easier for the camera's white balance, which is only a guess.
Love this.
Sharp, great gunmetal grey BG. IQ is excellent. great detail.
Your OP has the colors spot on. I just spent a day shooting the peregrine in NB with John Chardine so really appreciate your excellent technical skill of catching this speedster in flight.
well done,
Gail
If I may say so without sounding critical, those of you seeing the peregrine in the OP as a neural gray (which I assume it should be) have an issue with your monitor's color profile. There is a magenta cast, which I doubt is correct for a peregrine. (If so, I apologize.)
Here is a split image with the original on the left and my color correction on the right, and a stripe through the tail revealing the original again. There is also a neutral gray band laid over the image. If it and my correction looks greenish and the bird looks neutral, your color display is biased toward green and you will be adding a magenta cast when you adjust an image to what looks neutral.
Some monitors don't profile well (a separate step from calibrating, which some also don't do well) and the ones that do will do drift over time.
Excellent top view. I think the colours of the bird look fairly accurate in your first post. They look a bit off in the second.
I often find myself agreeing with Daniel but do not agree with him on this occasion regarding head angle. I don't see the bird's head pointing away. The bird is looking straight ahead in line with the axis of the body and the light is hitting it full on. If anything the axis of the body is marginally toward you. Respectfully I think that we can go a bit overboard with head angles at times though I would agree consideration should be given with each image . Birds heads are not flat, they are shaped...some rounded some more angular.
Excellent topside view, the details are amazing
colors in OP are natural and represent the real life peregerine
Diane, I think your monitor has an issue because your repost does not look like peregrine plumage to my eye. it is pale and has a greenish\cyan cast.
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That would be water Stuart, it a turquoise color most of the time and late afternoon it can be more on the blue side.
Thanks for the comment.
Sorry Diane, but the water color is correct as well as the bird. If the water was blue you would have seen blue in the image.
I do have a calibrated monitor, maybe yours is out of sync.
Diane
The image posted is of a juvenile Peregrine Falcon and will not have any neutral grey body parts. Even if it were an adult the upper side plumage would be blue/grey with some brown tones retained.
Hope this helps.
Originally Posted by arash_hazeghi
The real test here is, how does the gray stripe look? It is neutral gray (the color checker shows the R, G and B values all equal). It matches the colors in my corrected area of the bird, which are also averaging near neutral gray, within a range of natural color variations. If my corrected areas, and therefore the gray stripe, look greenish/cyan on a monitor, then that is the one that is off.
The bird might reflect some blue light from the sky, but I doubt magenta except in very unusual lighting conditions. Those of you who see the magenta areas as neutral are not seeing the colors correctly, either due to the monitor or color vision.
When I answered yesterday, I was on my calibrated and profiled Eizo Color Edge, but now I'm on my MacPro laptop, which won't calibrate or profile with good results (most laptops won't) so it runs in its native color space. The colors are exactly the same here -- a magenta cast on the front of the bird and neutral on the back part that I corrected.
When you use a monitor that is off you get used to the color variation and it looks normal -- similar to how our eyes correct for the blue cast of light in open shade. Painting a gray stripe on a temporary layer is a way to really see if you (or the camera) have inadvertently introduced a color cast.
If the juvenile should be brownish instead of neutral, that doesn't change the argument. It shows a magenta cast next to the neutral gray stripe, when it should be showing a brownish tint in stead of a neutral one.
I can certainly accept your BG color, but in the context of the magenta cast on the bird I wasn't sure if you had adjusted it to something that didn't match what was intended.
Calibrating and profiling a monitor doesn't always guarantee good results. It can still be off. Some are notorious for just not being well corrected.
Diane,
I have to say the problem is on your end. The bird has no magenta cast as others pointed out too.
I have seen your WTK images often have a strong cast too. I pointed it out several times. I hope you can fix it.
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I can see some magenta on my monitor too. Although the repost may not be the correct peregrine colour, it has definitely removed the magenta i was seeing
Thank you, Shane.
If there was no magenta cast in the original post, then in my second post, in panel 9, the gray stripe I painted on would match the original bird, or the bird would appear brownish next to it, if the intention had been for it to be brown.
I corrected the color NOT according to my monitor, but by creating a Curves layer and using the neutral eyedropper to click various places on the bird. Of course there is some color variation in the bird, but it is slight; most places gave a very similar correction. That method is independent of any color perception on my part or any bias in my monitor.
I didn't correct it by what I thought looked neutral. I used PS to make it neutral. And that's how it appears on my monitor and on my laptop.
A peregrine falcon (I am not sure you have seen one uplcose?) does not have 18% grey or neutral plumage. when an image does not contain neutral grey setting something to neutral grey will screw up the colors as it did in your repost.
the repost image has bad colors, you can agree or not, it is up to you :) I wanted to make it clear for our readers.
Please keep the discussion focused on critique, for specifics about color correction you can start a thread and discuss in the digital forum where it is more approporatie
thanks
Last edited by arash_hazeghi; 07-09-2013 at 02:15 PM.
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Immature and juvenile peregrine falcons have colors that tend toward brown, as opposed to gray. As the birds mature, the gray feather trend becomes more dominant.
Arash is correct, in my view, in stating that Mike's OP colors are natural and accurate for a young falcon.
I can't comment on the color, I just think this is a great BIF photo of the Peregrine.
Very tough to pull off, a lot of skill involved and time put in I am sure.
Dan Kearl
There have been some really inspiring falcon images to come out of that area, and this is surely one of them. Fantastic OP.
A excellent image of this speedster
superb focus, great dof and somehow i like the colour of the bg
i am still looking at the feather details and man you nailed them superb
It is a lovely image with excellent detail, Mike, and is very difficult to get flying shots at this angle. In regards to the color cast issue, I find that there is a slight color cast. It is possible to find neutral gray in many images or a gray that is pretty darned close. I sometimes use the technique in the link below. When I applied it to this image there was a color shift. It works quite well. BTW, my monitor is calibrated correctly. :)
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/p.../neutral-gray/
This is a killer flight pose, Mike. The HA slightly away doesn't bother me at all. The eye and beak are clear and he looks as though he's on a mission. Love those topside feathers.
Thank you Diane and Amy for the helpful color cast tips. Color casts are often quite difficult to detect. Determining color casts and straight horizons were my toughest PS learning curves. You are both far more versed than I in PS, but I am in agreement that there is a slight magenta cast to the peregrine. I also went and looked through many peregrine images and couldn't find one with magenta, although there were some with hues of red. As you can see in my RP, the reds remain but the magenta does not.
Looking forward to more peregrine images, Mike!
Thank you, Marina, and thanks to Amy for a very good technique that is independent of color display or perception. Combine that with the quicker and dirtier method of painting a gray stripe on a temporary layer and you can get a good gauge of color. As Marina says, color casts are a very difficult thing to see.
Last edited by Diane Miller; 07-13-2013 at 01:18 PM.
This has turned out to be an informative thread. To my eyes the OP looked consistent with the "Niagara" peregrine photos I've seen over the last couple of years but I think all versions here could pass. More importantly though, thanks for a few new methods thatI've learned to detect and correct color casts!
I'm not saying my re-post is absolutely correct, I know it's not.
To my eye it does make the image stronger with out the magenta cast and a little stronger curve setting.
Without looking at someone else's monitor it is very difficult if not impossible to state in absolutes that their is out of calibration.
In extreme cases of course you can, with subtle color cast not so much.
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