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Thread: Elk

  1. #1
    BPN Member Terry Johnson's Avatar
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    Default Elk

    Name:  Elk-7-small.jpg
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    This image was taken at Wildlife Safari in Winston, OR. Image Info: Nikon D7000, 18-200mm at 105mm, 1/125 of a second, F5.3, ISO-100, A-priority. Image was taken from car window.

    Terry Johnson

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    Forum Participant edwardselfe's Avatar
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    Wow - what a healthy looking elk! You had a nice pose, reasonable light (looks like a cloudy day with diffuse sunlight) and a nice background with some trees. You composed it nicely with the elk standing on the left and looking into the shot. I might have included slightly less foreground and a bit more bg, just to show more of the interesting trees. That way, you would also have removed some of the slightly distracting pale grass stem in the middle of the shot. Depending on how you feel, it would be possible to remove that or darken it so it's not so obvious. I would also have increased your ISO to 400, or even 800, to give you more shutter speed. You got a nice sharp shot, but that must have been because you were rested on the car window, and the elk didn't move at all for the 1/125s that you needed for your shot. For wildlife, a 'safer' range of shutter speeds to ensure a sharp shot runs from 1/400 - 1/4000 depending on the movement of the subject and your intentions. Most modern cameras, and certainly the D7000, would allow you to increase your ISO considerably (probably to ISO 1600) before you really started to notice the downside of high ISO noise.

    I don't know which processing program you use, or whether you shoot in RAW, but I assume so. In your RAW converter, I would try to reduce the brightness of the lightest parts of the image, using the 'highlight' and 'whites' sliders or their counterparts in your program. Reducing those will tame the bright areas on the elk's back and antlers and allow you then to make adjustments to the image, without the distraction of those areas. I would also selectively sharpen more on the elk, leaving the bg unsharpened.

    Hope this helps you and perhaps there will be other comments.

    Ed

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    BPN Member Terry Johnson's Avatar
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    Ed, thanks for taking the time for detail critique. I shot several images of the elk changing the camera settings for ISO, and shutter speed a couple of times. I choise the lower ISO and shutter speed because the image had less noise and was still sharp. As far as the hightlights on the fanny and the antlers, I will play with that a bit and see what affect it has. I may also remove the blurred branch in the FG as you have suggested.

    Thanks again for the response...Terry Johnson

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    Hi Terry, you had excellent feedback from Ed above. The only thing I would add is whether you sharpened the entire image or just the elk? The grass looks a bit too crunchy to me. I think you were lucky that the elk not moving, or the 1/125 SS would not have been enough. TFS. Loi

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    BPN Member Morkel Erasmus's Avatar
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    Nice-looking rack here Terry.
    You've received some great feedback from Ed. I can only add that I would run some more sharpening (albeit very lightly) on the elk's head as well. I would also consider a closer crop, not that this one doesn't work for me.
    These usually don't bother me - but I really am noticing that lone upstanding out of focus flower in the middle bottom......if it fits your processing ethics you can clone it out easily. I normally don't so would understand perfectly if you also don't want to.
    Morkel Erasmus

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    BPN Member Andreas Liedmann's Avatar
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    Terry ,
    pretty looking elk bull with the lovely soft stuff around the antlers ( do not know the name).

    You got good suggestions by Ed for shooting ,next time.I like the crop you have chosen and i am fine with OOF flower.Grass is not too sharp for me. Good contrast and tonality in general with nice deep greens , not sure if the greens are not too "blue".
    I would definitely remove the blues out of the darker parts and the bark of the trees.There is obviously blue creeping through. But this could be due to "wrong" color profile you have chosen, we "need " here sRGB and you have Adobe RGB embedded in your file .For web you should use sRGB that we all can see what you see on your screen.

    TFS Andreas

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    Lifetime Member Rachel Hollander's Avatar
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    Hi Terry - it's really all been covered above. Nice look at the bull. I too would look at getting rid of the one taller stalk in the fg, reducing the blues in the greens and a little more sharpening.

    TFS,
    Rachel

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    Terry, a very nice image with the velvet on the antlers. I agree there is a bit too much blue in the trees -- possibly an overall slight warming would be worth looking at.

    I think I've seen several of your images posted in AdobeRGB. Andreas is correct that sRGB is the way to go for general web posting.

    Check out the tutorial I have posted (and recently updated):

    http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...or-Calibration

    It's a sticky at the top of the ETL forum.
    Last edited by Diane Miller; 01-23-2014 at 05:27 PM.

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    BPN Member Terry Johnson's Avatar
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    Hello, Diane, thanks for the heads-up on the color issue. I have changed my settings in CS6 and ACR to sRGB.

    Thanks again...Terry Johnson

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    You want the editing space in CS6 to be Adobe RGB. Definitely. (Until you are ready to deal with the pitfalls of ProPhoto.) Set it in the Color Settings in the Edit menu, and check the boxes to warn of profile mismatches. (You can learn how to deal with them next week....)

    There is no user-selectable setting for color space in LR. It works behind the scenes in a variant of ProPhoto and the LAB color space but you don't need to understand or know that.

    What you want to do is set the Pref's for LR for the external editor to open in PS in AdobeRGB (and have set that in PS as its working space).

    Then when you export from LR to a JPEG for the web, choose the sRGB space and check to embed the profile. You can export a layered PS file and LR will do all the work for you - flatten, resize and convert to the profile. Save that as a preset for web export and you're set.

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    BPN Member Terry Johnson's Avatar
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    Diane, I do my pre-processing in Adobe Camera Raw 8.3. When you are importing a file into ACR 8.3 and the ACR 8.3 window opens with your image, at the bottom of the screen you have an underlined and high-lighted field that defines your color-space, bit size, image dimensions, images size, PPI, and screen definition. If you 'click' on this field, it will bring up a dialog box where you can choose what color-space you would like to use in ACR. I choose sRGB IEC61996-2.1.

    I maintain this sRGB IEC61996-2.1 color-space throughout my processing including within CS6. Your thoughts please...Terry Johnson

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    I would recommend AdobeRGB in both places, for the wider color gamut, that retains more of what the camera captured. It is closer to the gamut for inkjet printing, too.

    If you only export to the web and have printing done at places that want sRGB, then your color settings are OK, but I hate to throw away gamut. Your camera captures way more than the AbobeRGB gamut, and the same holds for ACR's working space as I stated for LR, above. Those settings you mention are only for when the image is opened in PS.

    Since you are working in sRGB there is no need to convert to AdobeRGB for web posting. You gain nothing -- you can't invent colors that aren't there. And some older browsers may not interpret the colors correctly.

    I assume you are "converting" to AdobeRGB, not "assigning" it. That would change the colors from what they should be.

    But my strong recommendation is to work in AdobeRGB and convert to sRGB when needed for web output, and for any printing services that want it. (You'll get wider color gamut in prints using a service that works in AdobeRGB, but only if you have used it as your PS color space.)

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    BPN Member Terry Johnson's Avatar
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    Diane, thanks for the suggestion. I will change the color space for ACR and CS6 to AdobeRGB. If I need to place an image on the web or If I plan to print an image, I will convert to RGB.

    Does this sound correct? Terry Johnson

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    Almost, except for some semantics. What you will be changing in ACR isn't its color space (you can't do that) but a specification of in what color space it will pass off the image to PS. And when you put an image on the web you will convert to sRGB. For print, the best gamut depends on the printer. Many commercial printers will want sRGB. For inkjet printing (your own printer or a higher-end outside service) you will want to keep the image in Adobe RGB. All the spaces are different flavors of "RGB." The relevant ones for digital darkroom work are sRGB, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB, in order of increasing color gamut.

    Seems like small points, but understanding how this stuff is structured is worthwhile.

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