Wood Duck Drake

[steve torna]

Wood Duck Drake (Aix sponsa) from March 2015. Canon 1D iv, 500mm f/4 IS + 1.4x, tripod, ISO 640, 1/1000 second @ f/8, manual mode. Process in LR 5, highlights -29, shadow +10, saturation +10, sharpness +5, NR +10, 40% crop. Please comment and critique; I am wondering about the position of the head, the glare/hot spot on the breast, and why are the white throat feathers lacking detail compared to the other white feathers and any comments in general. Yellowstone County, Montana around sunset. Thanks steve

[Warren Spreng]

Wood Duck Drake (Aix sponsa) from March 2015. Canon 1D iv, 500mm f/4 IS + 1.4x, tripod, ISO 640, 1/1000 second @ f/8, manual mode. Process in LR 5, highlights -29, shadow +10, saturation +10, sharpness +5, NR +10, 40% crop. Please comment and critique; I am wondering about the position of the head, the glare/hot spot on the breast, and why are the white throat feathers lacking detail compared to the other white feathers and any comments in general. Yellowstone County, Montana around sunset. Thanks steve

Love these ducks! I like how you handled the water around the duck, no glares, great BG for it. Since you asked I took your image back into LR and reduced the Whites -100 and Highlights -100 and brought the shadows up just a little more +63 too to bring out a little more detail in the crest. You could probably reduce that number on the Highlights to brighten it up more for taste. I think this also brought out a bit more detail in the neck feathers. As to the hot spot on the breast, you could simply clone that out if it bothers you, I don't have a problem with it.

[Diane Miller]

This is a very nice image, with lovely colors in the water, a nice reflection and a quizzical look from the colorful duck.

Editing a JPEG has the limitation that blown whites and blocked blacks don't have any tonalities in those areas to recover, so you get both whites and blacks going gray. But there may be more to recover in the raw file. All you can do is try. Start back at zero settings and pull down the Exposure to see what the whites show -- they could be too blown to recover, but those areas are small and it's not a huge flaw to me.

I'd try going lighter on the Shadows slider and tweaking the Black slider down to stretch the dark tones back from any flatness. Before lightening Shadows I will increase the Exposure, as it brings up less noise, but that may lose detail in the whites here.

If noise becomes an issue you can squeak up the Luminance NR a little without destroying detail, or do NR in PS. I like Nik's Dfine for that.

I wonder if the reds in the eye are a little too hot? Did you try the different camera profiles in the Camera Calibration tab to find the best starting point?

[steve torna]

Thanks Warren, it looks way better with the highlights and white toned down. Thank you Diane, I will have to work on your suggestions on the RAW file and I will repost tomorrow with changes. steve

[Warren Spreng]

Thanks Warren, it looks way better with the highlights and white toned down. Thank you Diane, I will have to work on your suggestions on the RAW file and I will repost tomorrow with changes. steve

Looking forward to it!

[steve torna]

Thanks again, I tried to recover the white on the throat without much success, but I did use exposure rather than shadow adjust to bring out detail in the head which definitely preserved IQ and toning down the eyes softened the appearance. Great exercise. steve

[Don Lacy]

Hi Steve, Your post is really good the image falls apart with the adjustments Warren made to the Jpeg you might be able to pull a bit more detail out of the blacks from the Raw file, the whites are fine they are reading 220 no where near blown, with the angle of the light and the type of feathers they are you are not going to get any more detail I would not worry about it. The only way you could have improved the image was at the time of capture with some fill flash to bring out more detail in the blacks.

[steve torna]

Thanks Don

[Sandy Witvoet]

Awesome Woody, Steve! Agree with Don.... perhaps somewhere in between the OP and RP on processing. Love the eye.