Stilt - Wings position?

[Luis Patacao]

Hi, i have doubts in this image regarding the wing position, on one side it helped the reflex, on the other side it seems to remove some depth to the stilt.


Pernilongo | Stilt - Taking flight por Patacão, no Flickr



Would love to hear thoughts on this.

D7000 + 70-300mm at f/5.6.
Basic processing and cropping in LR, denoise and sharpened in PS.

[Dave Viklund]

Hi Luis, I would agree. I think if there was more to distinguish between the wings It would work well but as it is I do think you lose depth to the bird. I do not know anything about post processing but could you maybe lighten a thin line from the back to the crook of the wing to help break up the two wings giving the stilt back some depth.

Dave Viklund

[Diane Miller]

I think some tonal separation between the two wings would be a very nice touch here -- it looks like a wonderful image! It would be a little tedious but not otherwise difficult to select the back wing. Then the darks in the image might be subtly lightened, perhaps using Nik's Detail Extractor (in Color Efex) and mask out the back wing using that selection, to keep it held at its current tonal value.

BTW, you can post up to 1200 px wide x 900 tall -- that gives people a better look for comments.

[Luis Patacao]

I think some tonal separation between the two wings would be a very nice touch here -- it looks like a wonderful image! It would be a little tedious but not otherwise difficult to select the back wing. Then the darks in the image might be subtly lightened, perhaps using Nik's Detail Extractor (in Color Efex) and mask out the back wing using that selection, to keep it held at its current tonal value.

BTW, you can post up to 1200 px wide x 900 tall -- that gives people a better look for comments.

Thanks for the help Diane, i will try it in PS. Also, i thought that images of 1200 px and the image hosting service were only available for members, thanks for letting me know this.

[Luis Patacao]

Hi Luis, I would agree. I think if there was more to distinguish between the wings It would work well but as it is I do think you lose depth to the bird. I do not know anything about post processing but could you maybe lighten a thin line from the back to the crook of the wing to help break up the two wings giving the stilt back some depth.

Dave Viklund

Thanks for the comment Dave, it compresses the bird a bit. I will try to improve the wings luminosity in PS.

[Diane Miller]

Thanks for the help Diane, i will try it in PS. Also, i thought that images of 1200 px and the image hosting service were only available for members, thanks for letting me know this.

You may be right -- apologies -- I'm fairly new here myself!

With most (all?) browsers we can enlarge the image, or make it smaller, as needed, by changing the whole page with Ctrl-plus or -minus. I neglected to think of that so I opened the image in PS and there I could tell that the wing whose tip is reaching out to the right is the front wing, which in not in good focus. I had seen that tip as belonging to the back wing. That makes the image more questionable, for me, but it's still certainly worth any learning it can encourage. I did try Tonal Contrast and got some improvement, for me. Better detail in lights and darks both.

I also noticed you have the image in AdobeRGB. Although the profile is embedded, some older non-color managed browsers won't interpret the color correctly. You are safer to always convert to sRGB (and embed the profile) for any web output.

[Luis Patacao]

You may be right -- apologies -- I'm fairly new here myself!

With most (all?) browsers we can enlarge the image, or make it smaller, as needed, by changing the whole page with Ctrl-plus or -minus. I neglected to think of that so I opened the image in PS and there I could tell that the wing whose tip is reaching out to the right is the front wing, which in not in good focus. I had seen that tip as belonging to the back wing. That makes the image more questionable, for me, but it's still certainly worth any learning it can encourage. I did try Tonal Contrast and got some improvement, for me. Better detail in lights and darks both.

I also noticed you have the image in AdobeRGB. Although the profile is embedded, some older non-color managed browsers won't interpret the color correctly. You are safer to always convert to sRGB (and embed the profile) for any web output.

Thanks for the advice Diane, i still have much to learn, specially in photoshop.