Juvenile Black Redstart

[Michael F Milligan]

My first offering, so go easy!

Sony A77 1/400 sec, ISO400, f8.0

My PS skills are a bit rubbish so this is limited to a little sharpen, a tweak on the levels, a crop and that's all.





[I think I've stuck to the submission guidelines...]

[John Chardine]

Hi Michael- Great to have you here at BPN. Big welcome! You've started out with a beautiful first post. I am loving the detail in the feathers and the eye. The background colour adds some interest. There are a few things you could do to improve the image. I will assume you ran sharpening on the whole image. If you look at the rusty background you can see some noise there, which was made more obvious by sharpening. Apologies if I am off-base here. The secret is to isolate the subject and then run sharpening just on it. There are various ways to isolate the subject but my favourite is to use a quickmask or I use a Topaz plug-in to Photoshop called Remask. There are a large variety of other techniques to select portions of the image. One key is to make sure the selection has a soft, feathered edge so that whatever you do does not end abruptly at the selection boundary. As far as the crop is concerned, I like the room you have given top and bottom but it generally works to give more room in the direction of gaze- in this case to the right- than the other way. The area to the left of the bird could be considered "negative space" and you don't need as much of it.

Based on this first post, we really look forward to more from you. Oh and BTW, the max height of an image posted to BPN is 900px. Max. width is 1200px with a max. file size of 400kb, which is ample to save a jpeg of those dimensions at a very high quality.

Here's BPN guideline 18 as written:

"Images should not exceed 400 kilobytes nor should they exceed 1200 pixels on the horizontal side or 900 pixels on the vertical side"

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Michael - Welcome to BPN. I too love all the fine feather detail that you have captured. John has covered the critique very well. One other thing I might consider is to selectively burn the white rock in the fg a bit so it doesn't draw the eye. Very nice first post and looking forward to seeing more from you.

TFS,
Rachel

[Marina Scarr]

Welcome to BPN and terrific first post you have here. Love all the feather details and the color palate. I am seeing some noise in the BG. Agree with Rachel on burning the bright rock a bit b/c I think it is detracting a bit from a lovely image.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Hey Michael, glad to see you already took the plunge and posted an image! What a cutie, and it sure made itself tall and proud for you. I like the BG matching the undertail colour...what is it? The composition is tight for my tastes, but going vertical was the way to go, kudos on that. All of us had rubbish processing skills at first, so keep it up, read up, and keep practicing and participating...soon you'll get the hang of it :-)

[Michael F Milligan]

Thanks for welcome and replies, will post another version soon!

[Michael F Milligan]

Thanks for welcome and replies, will post another version soon!

Well I would have done if I hadn't lost the original file.

Computer upgrade, software upgrade etc so all I can do now is play about with the already imperfect image. I'll hopefully put a new thread up tonight with something else for you to have a look at.

Cheers
Mike