Small, big, humongous!

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

A follow up on my previous post (Picnic at sunset) showing nice interaction between bull, cow & youngster sharing a favourite drinking spot.

Sharpness & sky recovery in PS6.

D600
Nikkor 70-200mm VRI f2.8 @ 120mm
f/4 | 1/400s | ISO-800

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Tobie - I like the more off-center position of the main eles in this one. Very nice golden light hitting them too. I would apply another round of USM selectively to the 3 central eles.

TFS,
Rachel

[Gabriela Plesea]

Well done Tobie, this was taken in lovely light and I like your choice of crop and presentation overall. Indeed a tad of sharpening on the three subjects would take this up a notch, would like to see more of your images from this trip, keep them coming!

Kind regards,

[Morkel Erasmus]

They just love drinking where the freshest water comes out. See this in Etosha as well...
I like the poses and positioning here more as well, Tobie, although the youngsters dustbathing in the background of the previous one was very nice.
It does need another round of sharpening as mentioned. I think you could have sacrificed more ISO on the D600 for a bit more DOF - say f5.6 at ISO-1600?

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

Thanks for the comments, guys. I have pushed the USM more or less to the limits and I think the little that's left will not make much of an obvious difference, but I'll try.

Morkel in spite of good things I've seen about high ISO handling by the D600 (one of the reasons I've bought it), that's not what I experience. I find it to be good up to 800, reasonable at 1,000 and if I want something usable I only go to 1,250 in extreme cases. Anything beyond that needs a lot of PP and a bit of luck.

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Tobie - I'm not sure what you mean about pushing the USM to its limits and that there is only a little left. What are your settings for USM and are you applying multiple rounds? Where in your workflow are you applying USM?

Rachel

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

Hi Tobie - I'm not sure what you mean about pushing the USM to its limits and that there is only a little left. What are your settings for USM and are you applying multiple rounds? Where in your workflow are you applying USM?

Rachel

Rachel thanks for your reply. I've applied selective sharpening USM (60%, 2 and 2 inside a LM) in PS after bringing highlights down as much as possible in LR. I've ran two or three USM rounds until strong pixelation appeared (not noise - clear black & white spots), went back one step, lowered USM to Amount 50%, radius radius 1 and threshold 1 and added that round of sharpening. Another round resulted in pixelation again. I don't believe more USM is going to make much of a difference but I stand to be corrected.

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Tobie - my default settings for USM are 99, .3 and 0, selectively applied. The number of rounds applied will depend on the individual image and techs. USM applied after resizing. Although for posting on BPN, I often use the sharpening/resizing actions posted by Morkel in the sticky at the top of the forum.

Rachel

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

Hi Tobie - my default settings for USM are 99, .3 and 0, selectively applied. The number of rounds applied will depend on the individual image and techs. USM applied after resizing. Although for posting on BPN, I often use the sharpening/resizing actions posted by Morkel in the sticky at the top of the forum.

Rachel

Thanks Rachel - I was not sure what USM values would be kind of realistic. I've tried yours (starting over from the original RAW file) and could not achieve results as good as my OP (BTW PS refused a threshold of less than 1). I'll review Morkel's write-up in case I can apply some of it.

[Andrew Robinson]

Some small points have been covered but for someone from the North this is just what I imagine a scene at water must be like. Superb image that makes me almost feel I am there.


Andrew

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

Some small points have been covered but for someone from the North this is just what I imagine a scene at water must be like. Superb image that makes me almost feel I am there.


Andrew

Thanks for your comment Andrew!