Eurasian Jay

[Svante Larsson]

NIkon D800, ISO1600, 70-200 mm f/2.8 with TC x1.4 at 270 mm and f/5, 1/640 sec. I have cooled it down slightly from an earlier version but still maybe it is a touch warm ?!?

Any comments on possible improvements welcome.

[Steve Kaluski]

I quite like the posture, but I agree Svante, it's quite warm. Also the subject looks like it has been either lightened, or hefty amount of Nik software has been applied (Detail extractor), as again, there is no 'depth' to the blacks in the face/eye area, plus you need to look at how you mask areas, as there are visible artefacts around the vegetation and subject. Look at the smooth areas say around the tail of the bird, then you will see the 'mottled haze' where you have overlapped areas with the brush.

TFS
Steve

[Diane Miller]

I don't know the bird but it does feel a bit warm.

Can you give more details about the processing, especially in regard to the things Steve mentions? (I haven't managed to find the earlier version -- maybe you gave processing info there.)

[Gregor Bergquist]

Hej Svante

I like this portrait. Good posé, nice foreground and background, and a good low angle. I do agree with comments on pp and that it is a bit warm. I also think that his head and eye is not as sharp as the feathers in the middle of his body. Maybe because he is moving?

Good to see a fellow Swede here

TFS / Gregor

[Jim Keener]

Hi Svante. I especially like how the background pushes the bird and grasses forward. And was a bit distracted by the snippet of grass on the right edge near the bird's beak

[Svante Larsson]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your comments.

Steve: I went overboard with PS shadows and highlights trying to recover detail out of the blacks thus loosing the depth of the blacks - guilty as charged -).

Diane / Steve: With respect to workflow I usually do most of the basic stuff with respect to cropping, whitebalance, tone and presence including Clarity and Vibrance in Lightroom.

For the images I like best I do a final pass in PS starting with any cloning, thereafter Photokit Capture Sharpener (I usually let this work on the whole image). Then anything I think need to be done using curves, levels etc. and finally a bit of Photokits Creative Sharpener with the whole image masked. I then remove the mask for the bits I want sharpened by brushing white on the mask.

In this specific instance I wasn't to happy with the background noise however so I did something which I have very litttle experience with and that was I used Photokits Creative Smothing Effects over the whole image (I didn't think PS noise reduction was good enough). I then removed the smothing by masking the bird and the foreground rather sloppily with a black brush. Last I save the image back into LR. In LR I use the export function to take the image down to allowed pixel width (with 96 dpi) including output sharpening for screen - standard amount.

The effects seen in this image comes from my sloppy brush work on the smoothing. To my defence ;-), the effect is barely visilble on the highresolution TIF-file if you are not at 100% but becomes amplified in the export from LR with the reduction in number of pixels and thus required output sharpening.

/Svante

[Diane Miller]

I don't see any issues with your tonalities here, except that perhaps the fine grass stems are a bit hot. But maybe you've done what can be done with them without messing up other things. Although Shadows-Highlights is a powerful tool, it is limited by the tonalities that came in from the RAW converter. I love the Shadows and Highlights sliders in LR 4 and above (the Process 2012 algorithms) -- combined with Exposure they can recover remarkable detail in most images.

I've had the best noise reduction results with either Nik Dfine or Neat Image. Sometimes one works better than the other, but both seem to me to be far superior to PS's NR tools and often will take out noise in the smooth BG areas without messing with the subject, so sometimes no masking is needed. This seems to work better earlier in the workflow, before I've done too much to the base image.

I haven't used the Photokit Creative Smoothing, so can't compare to it.

[Iain Barker]

Hi Svante

The grasses look quite warm and bright but to the the tone of the Jay look quite natural to me. I think you have done well to get close enough at 270mm and these are clever birds and don't usually hang around once they realise you are close. Was it shot from a hide?

Iain

[Svante Larsson]

Hi Iain

Yes it was shot from a hide. I was actually in the hide to see and photograph Golden Eagles and if you look a few posts earlier you have an image of a Golden Eagle where I shortly explain the setup.

/Svante