Red-tail in a tree
I was fairly close to this Red-tail just before take-off. I cloned out quite few oof branches round the bird but still wonder if the image is too fussy. Personally I prefer at least some habitat/ context in most bird photos. Nikon D7000, 300 f4+TCE14, hand-held. 1/2500, f6.3, ISO560. Processed in LR5 and Mac Preview. Thanks for any comments.
Richard
Great capture Richard - really shows of the bird's markings. The only remaining branch that bothers me a little bit is the big in-focus one behind the bird's wing. I'm not sure you could take that out though without making the photo look less natural. Well done.
Great catch, wonderful tonalities and sharpness! If it were me, I'd accept that the environment is what it is.
One can process in Mac Preview? I switched to Mac a few years ago but didn't know that. Think I'd prefer LR/ACR and PS, though.
Hi,
I do nearly all my processing in Lightroom, but after I re - size for the Web I save the image on my Mac's hard drive and open it in Preview to check it. Usually I then sharpen the downsized image a little more, and sometimes tweak the shadows or color slightly and it looks better. I'm never sure if it's just something on my Mac, or whether I have calibrated the screen correctly, but it usually succeeds in improving the iq a bit. The sharpening in Preview seems good, and I seem to remember reading that somewhere. But of course I do most of my processing including nr, sharpening, selective sharpening etc. in Lr and sometimes use PSE as well before saving.
Richard
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The most common practice here seems to be to sharpen the JPEG with Smart Sharpen in PS, at a very small radius (I usually use the minimum one) and maybe 50%. Don't know if PSE has Smart Sharpen, though.
Lately I've been doing the Export step in LR with Sharpen for Screen, set to High. The result looks the same to me as sharpening the JPEG in a separate step, which involves another lossy save. I've also been experimenting with some careful sharpening on the master file before export. The differences seem slight to me, with an image that was sharp to begin with.
The secret is a good image to start with!
Sweet! Great focus, action and overall detail! I'm ok with the environment.... Maybe think about removing the shadow that's crossing over the birds neck?
www.mibirdingnetwork.com .... A place for bird and nature lovers in the Great Lakes area.
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