This is the image I'm thinking of printing. Rehabilitating eagle with the national park's service (or something similar) up in Alaska.
ISO 200, 1/250s @ f/5.6
In Lightroom, applied lens profile corrections, exposure and contrast, added some vibrance and saturation, sharpening 50/1.0/25/46, no NR.
First image is cropped and resized for forum guidelines. Second image is 100% crop.
I'd like to clean up the pupil of the eye a bit, but it will be harder to do the iris.
Any recommendations on handling the eye, and sharpening/NR? Any other thoughts? Thanks!
Interesting thought to leave it ... I thought it looked a bit busy. I know that catch lights in portraits are a good thing but you can see human figures and buildings in that eye! :)
My PS skills aren't up to it but the only bit I would try and clone is the dark rectangular section at the top of the pupil. It makes the pupil edge look uneven. I like the reflection it looks real.
No time to demo it, but I'd just fill in the blue area that dips down into the dark pupil in the left and the area that cuts into the iris on the right, and clean up the dark part of the pupil. Zoom way in and it's an easy clone job.
Nice job, Craig. Or you could just clean up the "horizon line" like this, to leave some sparkle from the sky. It took zooming way in and using a tiny clone brush at about 50% hardness to get a sharp edge.
To prepare for a print, resample to the size and resolution as they request and look at it at 100%. Then try 50% and 25%, which may be a better simulation of the print, as you won't be looking at it from inches away.
Try experimenting with NR and sharpening to get what looks good. You may need to limit NR to the sky or other detail-less areas, but Nik's Dfine (a plugin for LR or PS) will usually do a great job on the whole image without the need for masking, preserving detail in feathers while removing most noise in featureless areas.
I think this will make a stunning print! Let us know how it comes out.
Curves still aren't great, and my edges are actually sharper than the edges of the pupil in the original photo, but I can't spend any more time fussing. I doubt it's noticeable except through really close inspection anyway.
Juvenile Bald Eagle
