Little Grebe on pink

[Conrad Bester]

Hi Everyone. I would appreciate your comments and feedback.

This Little Grebe was photographed this morning at Marievale Bird Sanctuary South Africa with the Tamron SP 150-600 f/5-6.3 Di VC USD lens (at 450mm) and the Canon EOS 7D. 1/320 sec, at f/8, ISO 800, in Manual Mode. Lens resting on a bean bag from a hide.

[Marina Scarr]

What a stunning bird, and the what appear to be pink blossoms are stunning. You have a nice pose and wonderful feather details and colors. It's possible your image may need a little bit of CW rotation but it's pretty tough to tell with this particular image. Welcome to BPN and looking forward to seeing more of your images.

[gail bisson]

Hi Conrad and welcome to BPN.
I really like the grebe and the flowers clinging to him/her. IQ is excellent.
Good look back pose.
One would think that a bird in a patch of pink flowers would be visually spectacular, but for me the colors aren't working. I am not sure why and I think it is a personal taste thing, so feel free to disagree with me!
I think the image needs a bit of CW rotation.
Looking forward to more from you,
Gail

[Arthur Morris]

Hey Conrad, Great to see you here and posting. And thanks a stack for your membership support. Cracking bird in a unique setting. While I do not think that the colors go very well together--it appears to be overly saturated as well, and though I have not seen this bird in life, there is a big color cast. I did lot of work in several steps for the repost.... Does this look more natural/pleasing?

[Conrad Bester]

Thanks for the comments.

Artie, I will go back and re-look my post processing. I did ad about +8 Saturation in Photoshop, and I moved the Tone slider about 2 clicks to the left in DPP. Looking at your repost, I think the accurate color might be somewhere in between..

[Arthur Morris]

Conrad, I look forward to seeing your repost. Is your monitor calibrated? The OP has an obviously huge color cast....

[Conrad Bester]

My screen has been calibrated, it's an MacBook 15", I applied the advanced calibration that comes with the OSX software. I'm starting to think that I was too generous with the saturation. Do I place the repost on this same thread?

[Arthur Morris]

Conrad, Re-posts and educational similars may be posted here (in this same thread).

[Conrad Bester]

Okay, I have reworked the image, please let me know if this is better.This is what I did different to the first edit.

In DPP
• 500K less light temperature to 5500K
• Less color tone form -3 to -1

In Photoshop
• Highlight/Shadows adjustment
• Rotated image CW, 1,7 degrees
• Eye sharpening
• Unsharp Mask on head
• +4 Saturation
• Made the tail slightly lighter and the head and back slightly darker with a Overlay layer with 50% grey.

It does look like my laptop screen is a little less saturated compared to my iMac at work.

[Arthur Morris]

Much much better. If I knew the bird in life I might think that the red-orange on the face/neck were still a bit over-done. But I don't.

[arash_hazeghi]

My screen has been calibrated, it's an MacBook 15", I applied the advanced calibration that comes with the OSX software. I'm starting to think that I was too generous with the saturation. Do I place the repost on this same thread?

Hi Conrad,

The OS-X calibration doesn't help you much. You need hardware calibration such as Spyder or Xrite. Basically, you need a device that can accurately read RGB values and calibrate your screen so it can output correct colors.

I like the image, especially the BG, the details are a bit coarse and crunchy. was this a big crop? I wish he was parallel to the camera as the tail has ran out of DOF

TFS and welcome to BPN

[Conrad Bester]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll see what I can do about the color calibration. Arash, it is not a big crop, only a little bit taken off the sides.