Fire & Ash

[Andre Pretorius]

An exposure nightmare: Blacks and flaming Reds!!

We had this visitor for a brief while at our pond, captured this male at 9:36 on New Years day 2014.

He was trying to built a nest in the Papyrus.


Used Aperture Priority with Centre-weighted metering on D3S with 600F4.

ISO 800

1/400? with f6.3

LR5 for WB and others basic adjustments, Raw pre-sharpening.

I have used multiple layers masked with different masks for blacks and reds, doing levels,curves, sat etc in CS6.
Struggled to get detail from blacks and dealing with hot red pixels.
DE on eye, face and shoulder with low opacity.
Mask on complete bird with selective colour layer adding or subtracting minor black adjustments on reds,blacks and neutrals.
D&B layer with soft light (TK action)
Worked bit on BG with levels and Brightness, contrast etc.
Cloned out some darker spots in BG.

This is not the best image, but I saw it as a challenge to deal with hot pixels AND dark blacks.

Will attached the image as captured in next post.

Any suggestions/crits/tips?

Thanks

Andre

[Andre Pretorius]

The Image as captured:

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi Andre, like them very much these Weavers , very nice colors.
Regarding the image , i like the calling pose and the perch.The crop is working too, for me.
The overall tones are quite flat and looking washed out , like wise the colors compared to captured frame.
I feel with these dark subjects only overexpose does help with the detail in the black , but without burning the HL too much .
Have you seen the seal image i sent to Gabriela ?

TFS Andreas

[Andre Pretorius]

Hi Andreas

Did see the image, processing AMAZING!

Have found that when trying to lift exposure on blacks it becomes"washed" out. Tried everything I know NOT to have that.

Original have more punch, but no detail in lights or darks.

Trying to expose to brighter areas to have histogram not leaning to much to the right, can not recover blown highlights with no detail….? (ETTR?)

Have you got some magic potion?

[Andreas Liedmann]

No Magic ,just a good cam and a good raw converter , combined with extraordinary PP work abilities …………….. please do not take me too serious .
Will show you some stuff when i see you , very soon i feel.
i am just trying hard to get as much as i can out of my images , like we all do.
You just need to spend tons of time , like i did and still do.

I blow in almost every image the HL , but remember what you see on your camera back is just the jpeg , not the actual raw file.

Cheers Andreas

[keith mitchell]

Hi Andre, you have certainly done some work on this image a lot that is way above my limited understanding of processing but certainly food for thought. It's a cracking looking bird ,afraid I would not know where to go with this one.

Cheers Keith.

[John Robinson]

Looks good to me. Well worked. Theres a litle programme called image guru thatworks wonders on lifting shadows.
Cheers
JR

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Very nice little bird. Good exposure and pose. Good job on post.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Nice image of an Orange Bishop (or is it a red?). I think your problems arose, and the resulting attempts to fix it, with the light you were shooting under. It was high contrast, and therefore the dynamic range of the scene was greater than the dynamic range the sensor was capable of recording. You had no choice but to clip the highlights, lose detail in dark parts of the image, or lose at both ends.
Your valiant effort with post processing was about as good as possible, yet all these problems you encountered would not occur if you had shot under low contrast light. Low contrast light, such as with overcast or cloudy skies, or sometimes, but not always, early or late, allows the sensor to be able to capture the entire dynamic range.

regards~Bill

[arash_hazeghi]

I like the calling pose. I wish the oof branch had not intersected with the bird.

The details are good in both blacks and reds. The original was a bit underexposed yet It should not be difficult to get the details in the blacks with your D3S. I would use CNX2 instead of LR5 and recover the shadows during RAW conversion instead of layers in PS.


Good luck

[Andre Pretorius]

Thank you all for comments!

Bill , we all would like to shoot only in sweet light, that early on New Years Day was still sleeping!

Aresh, I have downloaded the newest trial version last night, will give it a go.

Thanks

Andre