Scarlet Tanager

[Ken Janes]

I waited about an hour for this fellow to come out into the open at eye level.
Canon 5D MK III 400 mm f 5.6 lens hand held ISO 400 1/125 sec @ f 5.6

Adjustments and sharpening in LR 4 and a twig cloned from left upper corner in Photoshop.
About 20% crop.

Is the image over sharpened and is there too much room on the right. Thanks for your comments.

Ken

[Diane Miller]

Amazing you can handhold at that SS at that focal length! Kudos! And what a gorgeous catch of a spectacular bird!

To me it isn't oversharpened and I like the amount of room on the right. I might be tempted to lighten the darker area there, though.

The main issue for me is that the reds are blown out (as shown by the histogram), thereby losing detail. There have been a couple of recent posts where the reds were simply without detail, probably because they had been blown out and then desaturated to try to fix it.

If you'd like to pursue that, give some information about your processing. It's a common problem, apparently moreso for Canon than Nikon, and easily remedied.

[Ken Janes]

I see what you mean by the blown reds but i"m not sure how to fix it. Using LR 4 I reduced the highlights and whites so the histogram looked OK. Is there anything I can do in Photoshop? Also that should be 1/1250 sec. My typo!

[Diane Miller]

First and most important thing to do is in LR / ACR: go to the Camera Calib tab and choose a profile with more subdued reds. (The default Adobe Standard can have big problems with blowing out reds and yellows.) Then bring things back up, but not so far as to blow detail, in the Basic tab. Watch the histogram. The last sliders to touch are Saturation and Contrast.

In PS you can get more detail with Nik's Detail Extractor and some work in Selective Color. This was written long ago, before the tools we now have in LR/ACR:

http://www.adorama.com/alc/0011773/a...digital-photos