The sun is barely above the horizon and the bird is flying directly into it which accounts for the strange colours on the underside of the bird. I would have liked to have stopped down to f8 for more depth of field as I am losing the ends of the wings, but there was barely enough shutter speed to catch the action and I don't like to push the ISO above 400 on this camera. I had to add canvas to the left hand side. Thank you Diane for the for the instruction on how to do this. Does anybody think that the image may benifit from darkening the BG a little?
Canon 7D 100-400 L 1/1000 @f5.6 ISO400. Raw developed in ACR and Photoshop CS6.
Last edited by David Cowling; 12-15-2014 at 11:20 AM.
You caught some very interesting light here! And the head looks tack sharp -- wingtips can blur a little as far as I'm concerned. Wise choice on the ISO if you can get away with it, which you did here. And the added canvas looks great!
The BG looks fine to me, but you could always compare a slight darkening -- I'd try darkening it with the HSL sliders in LR first.
There is a little bit of color oddity here -- some green creeping in on the leading edges of the wings and a lot of blue on the trailing edges. Not the simplest correction but can be done. Click on the Tone Curve and on the icon in the lower right. Then under the histogram representation you'll see channels. If you know how to adjust colors for different tonal ranges, this will let you do it. To reduce the greens in the highlights, go to the green channel and pull the upper right corner down slightly. But maybe better to step back and find out what caused it rather than correcting it after the fact.
I might try lowering contrast on the body, too. But all in all, a very good effort under difficult circumstances!
Beautiful light. You must have gotten up pretty early. I've had a similar problem - blue in the shadows - early in the morning and I've wondered if in adjusting the white balance to take the warm light on the body the camera pushes too much blue in the shadows.
Color differences in shadows and highlights can seem OK in a raw file, but changing any tonal values that increase contrast, or Vibrance or Saturation, can emphasize blues in shadows. Sometimes I just resort to slightly desaturating blues, which is easily done in the HSL tab of LR/ACR.
as others have said, an extremely good effort under difficult lighting circumstances. I might go into LR HSL and pull back the blues and perhaps even the yellows, but overall a very good shot
I have redone this starting from the RAW File. As I looked at the original the sky looked green but in reality it was blue. I had the camera white balance set to daylight but I think the early morning sun fooled it. I pulled the white balance to the left in ACR to make the sky blue and this has had the effect of making the bird whiter. Not too sure if I have overdone it though. Never have these problems with landscapes,not!!
Last edited by David Cowling; 12-20-2014 at 12:13 PM.
In PS you should be able to get a good selection of the swan with the Quick Selection tool. That will let you adjust the blues in the sky and swan separately. I'm guessing your original is closer to the actual sky color. I'd try for a happy median in LR and tweak separately in PS.
I tried your original and couldn't get the sky much more blue without resorting to adding color, so I took your repost and selected the bird and desaturated blues and cyans. A also used a Curve with the same selection to lighten the darker tones a little. The sky color will have to be your choice.
Diane. Thanks for the update. The bird looks much better. I think that it is difficult for some photographers (ie me) to accept that colours at the beginning and end of the day are going to shift quite dramatically and are probably best left alone as much as possible. Back to the drawing board!!
Hey, it's your picture! You get to choose the colors! But it takes some practice to not stray too far from believable.
I'll often tone down the warm light of early and late -- it can be rendered too strongly sometimes. Unlike film, the raw converter parameters and our various tonal adjustments can affect colors quite a bit. The Camera Profile can have a big effect.
Last edited by Diane Miller; 12-21-2014 at 10:28 PM.
Swan at Sunrise
