Yellow Legs Late for migration sometime in December. Cloudy morning fresh snow. Shot in Nebraska
5d mark 11 Av 9.0 Iso 800 shutter 2000 sharpened cloned out small branch with ice on near birds head post edit dpp and elements11
I can still see the cloned out branch I can fix that but what am I doing wrong it still seems like you can see the outline of the quick mask or a little Halo effect' also maybe not the sharpest in the original raw file. critiques welcome
I do not see the halo effect you are talking about on my monitor. I am not the best at cloning things out buy maybe remove a little more of the branch under the bill of the bird in the front and I would add a little more room at the bottom since the birds have longer legs. I ran into the same leg issue in one of my recent shots.
Makes me cold!! I see the cloning artifact. A little more retouching should fix it -- lots of nice feathers on the back bird to use to cover the spot. I often need to do a lot of touchup with a clone or healing job. I clone on a copy of the BG layer and click the visibility of the cloned layer on and off to help me see where I didn't do the best job.
It's tight in the frame, especially at the bottom, as Dave said. Id like to see a little more environment if you have it. But it may be too busy -- always hard to decide how much to crop when you can't control the surroundings. The head of the near bird looks nicely sharp, with the rest of the image falling out of the focus plane. That helps to isolate the front bird, which could easily get lost against the other one. If I have time, I try to bracket DOF for shots like this and decide later which one is best.
The birds themselves are on the dark side -- you might want to experiment with bringing the darks up in raw processing. A dark bird in cloudy light is a challenge, especially with a light BG.
Yellow legs and Ice
