Burrowing Owl Portrait

[Ian Cassell]

Canon 7D
Canon 500mm/4 + 1.4x
1/2000 sec f/7.1 ISO 400

Levels and sharpening in CS6
Small crop for composition

[Diane Miller]

Very interesting pose and lovely, soft BG! I've tried to shoot the BOs in Cape Coral, FL and never one without a messy burrow BG. They weren't far enough out of the burrows and my husband got hungry before they did, I guess.

Is there any tonal leeway to lighten the beak without bringing up too much noise? It's a little lost.

I'm always a little puzzled when people say (frequently) that they did Levels (and to a lesser extent, Curves) in PS. I'm wondering what your raw processing was? I wouldn't expect that after maximizing things in raw that Levels would be needed in PS, except maybe for a few % of optimization. Am I missing something?

[Ian Cassell]

Hi, Diane.
I don't do much of my RAW PP in ACR short of cropping, but rather do almost all in CS6 - thus the levels. I used LR for a while, but never really adapted to it after using PS alone for so long, so don't use it anymore. I probably have enough to lighten up the beak a bit and, in fact, realized that it was a bit dark as soon as I posted it.

I keep meaning to play more with Canon's DPP for my raw converter, but haven't really spent the time with it.

There is a small city park in Gilbert (just outside of Phoenix) to which they have transplanted a bunch of these little guys and they have made themselves quite at home. One can move from burrow to burrow to find one who will cooperate with the camera.

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

Beautiful shot, Arthur! Nice crop & focus on the eye!

[Iain Barker]

This is a very nice image Ian and I can't fault it. Love the sharp eye.
It sounds like you have some great opportunities to photograph these birds, and I look forward to seeing more.

[Diane Miller]

No need to use LR if you don't feel you need it, but ACR is a major "helper" program to PS for raw shooters and well worth the trouble. There are many tutorials on LR but all apply equally to ACR as far as the raw conversion stuff goes. Slightly different interface, same engine.

If you use the white balance and tonal adjustment sliders in the Basic tab (the first one that comes up) and keep a close eye on the histogram you'll need to do very little in PS for tonal adjustments. It's strength is for cloning, masked adjustments (done with adjustment layers) and plug-ins, and fine-tuning tonalities and color after other work.

The raw adjustments are so powerful, and there are a number of raw converters, but ACR (including LR's interface for it) is one of the best.


I sometimes see complaints about getting bad colors in ACR/LR. With Canons, reds and yellow can be extremely over-saturated. That is due to the default Adobe Standard camera profiles in the Camera Calibration tab. Just go there and choose one of the others that looks better (none will be perfect) and tweak colors from there, back in the Basic tab. They will be specific to the camera used, and the same ones you can choose in the camera menu for JPEGs.