My first post - Long tailed Shrike

[prashant thakar]

This is my first post on BPN.


This Long tailed shrike captured morning Dec. 2013. Cropped for composition, small amount of NR and sharpened.


ISO: 200, 1/500 @ F: 8.0. Manual.
WB: Auto. HH. Canon: 550D, 400mm.


Thanks for viewing and appreciation. C & C are highly appreciated

[Wendy Kates]

This is beautiful, Prashant. What a beautiful bird! Your image is very sharp, the background is beautiful, and I love the long tail that is at a pleasing angle to the perch. But it does appear that the whites in the bird's neck are a little blown: when I checked them with my Digital Color Meter (in the Utilities folder on my Mac), the whites in the neck read 255. Can you reduce them with a highlights / whites slider in your post-processing software?

[keith mitchell]

Welcome Prashant,hope you enjoy this forum I certainly do. Your bird looks really good agree the whites might need a little attention and I wonder if you have a bit more canvas at the top of the image ,tiny nits, all in all a very nice presented image.

Keith.

[Sandy Witvoet]

Welcome, Prashant! Absolutely beautiful! Agree with above, a bit more room at the top. "Over-the-shoulder" is always my fave. Your BG is wonderful. Excellent!

[prashant thakar]

Thanks all for you comment, i will post new image soon

[Iain Barker]

Welcome Prashant

This is a very nice photo. I agree with the comments so far but cant fault it otherwise.

Iain

[prashant thakar]

Updated image. C & C are highly appreciated

[Shawn Zierman]

The repost is much better. You did a nice job handling the issues raised. Particularly nice job with the canvas extension on top. You obviously have some decent processing skills to handle that as seamlessly as you did. Beautiful bird on a sweet little perch. I prefer more direct frontlighting in this scenario, unless, as probably is the case, you were unable to move into position to obtain direct front lighting, then I would take what you have here in a heartbeat.

[Diane Miller]

This is a gorgeous shot!! As this is your first post, I can't wait to see more!

I'm curious what processing you are using, especially the RAW converter and parameters there.

[tomroper]

Welcome Prashant. As other have commented, this is a great photo for a first post. I can't wait to see more.

[prashant thakar]

This is a gorgeous shot!! As this is your first post, I can't wait to see more!

I'm curious what processing you are using, especially the RAW converter and parameters there.

Thanks sir,

Soon I will post new bird image. I use PS6 as my raw converter.

1. I adjusted lighting and shadow only at the time of raw convert.
2. level of image, brightness and contrast
3. color balance if need
4. sharping
5. image crop for composition


(am a bit confuse about color and sharping. which process takes first)
correct me, I am doing any thing wrong.

[Diane Miller]

Actually the RAW converter portion of CS6 is a separate program, Adobe Camera Raw (which is the same engine as the Develop module in Lightroom) and then a "rasterized" file is opened in PS. All the steps you show above are excellent, and best done before you go to PS. PS goes beyond a RAW converter's capabilities for adjustments that need sophisticated masking, cloning, compositing two shots, sharpening and noise reduction.

But in ACR you are working with all the tonal levels and color gamut that your camera captured, so you have much more leeway for making initial tonal adjustments and bringing out shadow and highlight detail than you do once you go into PS, where you have all those RAW settings glued into the file. And in ACR the settings are all reversible and tweakable non-destructively. That means you can go all the way with one of the sliders then turn around and reverse it with no actual change to the pixels. so you can play around with balancing the different sliders and then when you're happy with the file, take it to PS. Once you get into PS you can use non-destructive adjustment layers rather than direct adjustments, but you're still stuck with the tonalities you brought in.

Use caution when sharpening in ACR. A very subtle amount, viewed at 100% can be OK. But it is best done in PS near the end of your workflow, on an image that has been re-sized for some specific output. And noise reduction is best done in PS where you have access to several tools that are more sophisticated than in ACR.

[Sandy Witvoet]

It's beautiful Prashant! Background is so complementary to the Shrike.... Really love it. The only suggestion I have .... and it's certainly not necessary, is to perhaps clone out the spikey twig that points at the bird's tail. This is a wonderful image!

[kevin Hice]

Great image I reviewed both and the second image does look better with the whites pulled down a little but the first image was very.impressive.