I'm not a fan of changing the background, but am not against it. The result here looks good but could be improved. There are obviously processing artifacts on the up-right border of the image that could be easily fixed. The processed perch also looks weird on the right side: I would consider leaving the original there.
What aperture did you use? I'm asking because the perch looks sharper than the bird. Maybe closing down a bit (e.g. f/8) would help, or is it that you ran noise reduction on the bird? (Which I would definitely avoid).
Beautiful bird, nice pose, good eye contact. I prefer the original background on this; although, if mine, I'd take out the branches intersecting the head. Would like to see more detail on the bird.
Excellent replies above. I too prefer the original BG -- a little cleaning up would be much easier than replacement.
Check your BG replacement by putting a Curves or Levels adjustment layer above it and pull both ends in to vastly increase contrast. You'll see the artifacts clearly and with that in place you can touch up the cloning. But the perch in particular did get very strange and overworked.
You might try this -- clean up some of the more distracting branches, cut out the bird and copy it to a new layer (masked, not as an actual cutout, so you can fix imperfect edges), and try adding some blue to the BG. It may not be wonderful, but it's another idea with less artifacts to deal with.
Last edited by Diane Miller; 02-22-2015 at 09:36 AM.
Hooded Oriole with BG changed
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