Yellow Crowned Night heron in a tree.

[Amol Khedgikar]

Nothing happening in Dallas WRT birds.

This is from a local pond. absolutely the last light of the day through the clouds. Tripod with mongoose 3.6.

7D+500+1.4 II, ISO 500, 1/2500. 5.6

Thick brand cloned out a little. Deliberately kept the thicker branch. Cropped for comp.

[Marina Scarr]

Terrific light and very nice composition you chose for this image. Perfect pose on the bird.

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Very nice warm light. I like the alert pose of the bird, the funny feathers creating a crest and eyeball.

[Arthur Morris]

Did you cut off the top of the branch on the left?

[hennieloots]

Hi Amol - Nice pose and IQ. I like the comp with the perch leading me into the frame. Nice eye and pose to.
TFS
Hennie

[Amol Khedgikar]

Thank you guys,

Yes Artie. I cloned out a little part of it as mentioned in the description. I think I should have gone for more hardness in the Brush.

[Arthur Morris]

Thank you guys,

Yes Artie. I cloned out a little part of it as mentioned in the description. I think I should have gone for more hardness in the Brush.

It is pretty obvious. Less hardness might have helped.... Can you post a JPEG that shows the full frame original?

[Amol Khedgikar]

Here is the original Artie.

Could you please explain how Less hardness would have helped? I understand the edges would be a little softer but here I would have thought I need more hardness.

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Amol, Been busy :).

If you had used a soft brush it would not look as if you cut the branch off with a hacksaw :).

Wow. So much to say. First off, the image is hugely under-exposed. It looks as if you used the exposure suggested by the camera. With a light or white sky, you need to add at least 2 stops to that..... Underexposing the original and then lightening it increases noise and results in low quality files.

On a positive note the image quality that you got out with such a huge crop is astounding.

In spite of that, I believe that there was a very nice small in the frame image there for the taking. For the repost, i got rid of a few of the thin branches. If you go this route, you should wind up with a very nice file.

[Diane Miller]

I think the brush in the original surgery could have been even harder. The "cut" is obvious because it is a smoothly curved line -- a little more jagged, as a broken branch would be, would have been better, and a smaller, harder brush would make that easier.

Nice job of correcting exposure, but better done in camera as pointed out.

[Amol Khedgikar]

Artie,

This looks great. I can see why you think backing off a little with the crop works as well. I will process one with a loose crop now and re post. I went with the crop in the OP just t show off the details in the wings and eye.


I did not expose by the camera, Its just that I have clipped the whites/lights in the past and lost out in images that would be decent otherwise (Learned a lesson with a kingfisher image I lost to clipping). That evening the Sun was almost gone and was on and off behind the clouds. Iwas lazy to change anything for this shot and others That were exposed correctly weren't as sharp. and then the bird flew off. So I decided to work on this a little more in the PP to make it worth posting here.....:O

Thanks for taking time to work on the image and reposting.

I know in the OP the branch DOES look hacked off.... :) but I still think that a harder brush and a different/better cut angle would be better than a softer brush.....I am going to try that again...