Golden Eagle... again
Hi everyone,
I finally got some time to process another image.
Same eagle, just another frame. I think the BG and FG are a bit too busy, but I did not have much choice.
My question again is do you see any mistakes in post processing. What do you think should be done to improve the picture?
Nikon D3,
Nikon VR 300 mm f/2.8G + 1.7 TC
@ f/5.6, 1/800, ISO 400
PP: A bit of curves and levels; + 0.17 EC, local brightness corrections; tiny crop.
Thanks,
Kalin
It's a wonderful and dynamic image, and the Bg doesn't bother me. For PP you mention things that are done in PS, curves and levels (and levels can be done in curves -- no need to do both) but the most important part of PP is in the raw converter, so we should be talking about that.
The first thing i notice is a considerable blue cast in the shadows of the head and leading edges of the wing.
Hi Diane,
thanks for your reply! I use capture NX for PP where curves and levels are at the same place and it processes the raw file.
I see the blue cast but could not figure out how to remove it. I tried to google it but most of the tips I get there are with the black and white control points which does not bring good results.
Can you help me with that?
Thanks,
Kalin
I'm a Canon shooter and not at all familiar with Capture NX but I've heard that it is pretty basic. If you use Photoshop you have Adobe Camera Raw, and the same processing engine is in Lightroom. It is amazingly sophisticated for tonal and color control and easy to use with a straightforward interface. I gave some information in a reply yesterday in the Digital Photography Workflow forum.
Maybe others who are familiar with Capture NX can give more information about it.
The camera picks up blues in shadows that our brains correct for. The blues can be corrected in Photoshop but they would best be fixed as much as possible in the raw converter. There should be Temp and Tint sliders and subsequent color controls where blues and analogous colors can be changed in hue (color), saturation and lightness. (ACR / LR makes this sort of color control very straightforward.)
Are you using PS?
I opened the image there and it appears you have converted to sRGB but the image doesn't have an embedded profile, which it should, Go the Educational Resources forum and check my tutorial there:
http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...es-for-the-Web
But back to the blues, if you take the image into PS you can go to Hue and Saturation and work on the blue-gray areas. You will probably need to mask those changes to the bird so you don't change the soft colors in the background.
Please continue this discussion -- you are obviously shooting some excellent images that are worthy of the best presentation!
Last edited by Diane Miller; 10-04-2015 at 10:28 AM.
Hi Kalin, Another wonderful capture and this one is sharper, I do not find the foreground or BG distracting and with some PS work they can enhance the overall beauty of the image. I could not help myself and just had to work on this in PS and I usually try not to use advance techniques but i wanted to show you the full potential of the image. Here is a quick rundown of what I did in the order I did it
Color correction using the color balance layer I added a little bit of yellow, green , and red
I then increased the over all contrast using a curve adjustment to set the white and black points.
I felt the mid tones where a tad bright so I pulled them down with another curve adjustment
Now I like what the curve adjustments did to the back ground and foreground but I wanted to selectively adjust certain tones individually on the Eagle so this is where it gets advance
I used a light luminosity mask to select all the light tones and used a curve adjustment to darken them just a bit
I then used a brighter light mask to adjust the bright area on the head of the eagle using another curve adjustment
Looking at the Eagle I thought the darker areas where a little to dark so I used a dark luminosity mask to lighten them a bit
This improved them but I still thought the darker areas where to dark so i used super dark mask to adjust just the deepest shadows and lighten them just a bit more
So now I wanted to ad just a bit more contrast to the image but I did not want to effect the brightest and darkest areas of the image I just adjusted so I used what is called a midtone mask which only selects the midtones of the image and used a curve adjustment to ad mid tone contrast.
Now that I have all the tones where I want them I now want to focus the viewers attention on the subject and separate it from the BG and the easiest way to do that is to either lighten the subject or darken the surrounding areas here I darken the surrounding areas with a brightness/contrast layer and used a mask to only apply it to outer edges of the image.
The finishing touches to the image was some dodging and burning on the head of the Eagle to lighten the eye and darken the patch of light on the head.
I included a screen shot of the layer pallet from PS so you can see the mask if its white the adjustment is applied to those areas only
Don Lacy
You don't take a photograph, you make it - Ansel Adams
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs - Ansel Adams
http://www.witnessnature.net/
https://500px.com/lacy
Hi Diane,
First of all, thank you for the kind words and patience!
I use Photoshop for resizing my images with a preset actions, I found on this site. I am familiar with some of its abilities but not in depth. I also have Lighroom, it comes with my Photoshop package. I will have to spend some time with it. I am used to Capture NX and its Nik Software tools which are pretty easy to use.
I know about the embedded profile option, you told me about it in my previous post. This image was saved for web before that, so this is why it does not have that in it.
I will play a bit with processing this image with Lightroom and post here for comments.
Thanks again,
Kalin
Wow Don, thanks a lot! This really helps and I will have to give it some thought!
I have one question in mind on my first reading – how did you chose which are your white and black points? From what I know they should be parts of the image where color is either pure white or pure black and if you choose a darker or lighter colors, the image is messed up. Is that correct?
I will definitely have more questions as soon as I get in to the depths of what you taught me!
Cheers,
Kalin
The best software is the one you know how to use! But there are so many powerful tools today, it's always worth exploring and learning. I look forward to following your explorations.
Kalin,
Greetings. What a dynamic image! And close, too, at 510mm. Good show! Now, to the pp... I think the primary issue is WB. You are shooting Raw so the big first processing step is choosing WB. Since you have LR as well as Capture NX you might try the eye dropper WB tool in the develop mode for grins. You click on the eyedropper at the top left of the Basic panel in LR Develop and click on what should be a neutral color. Here I figured the end of the beak should be close enough. With just that adjustment to your OP one gets this:
Sometimes (particularly with blacks) you hit a spot that is more noise than signal and you get a strange WB, so just pick another spot until you like what you get. Anyway, give it a try, you might like it.
Cheers,
-Michael-
Very nice, Michael. I'd consider going a step further from here and look at backing off the White Balance slider (toward blue) just a very small amount. I think the tonal range captured is very good. But I would have a look at the very natural results that can be obtained with a slight reduction of the Highlights (moving the slider left) and a slight lightening of the Shadows (moving the slider to the right). With a good raw capture, you have tremendous leeway with these sliders, contrary to some opinions you'll see otherwise. All you need to use them effectively is a good monitor and some experience with what looks good and what goes too far. Balance them, of course, with the other sliders in that Basic group.
I have probably reduced the contrast a bit too much and should bring the black point down a bit. I'd probably resort to a hand-painted quick mask and then a curves in Photoshop to bring out more detail on the head.
Michael Frye has released the new edition of his excellent Lightroom e-book. I'll post a link in the Digital Photography Workflow forum.
Last edited by Diane Miller; 10-08-2015 at 10:52 AM.
Hey guys, all looks great. Thanks Michael. Your version looks a bit too yellow on my display or it is just me used to look at the image with too much blue.
I will try LR this weekend and see what happens. You gave me the direction so what is left for me is to follow the way.
Thank you!
Hey everyone,
As promised I put some time into PP this weekend. I gave a try to LR but starting from the beginning turned out very frustrating.
Nevertheless, thanks to your advices I found some new (for me) options in Capture NX and figured out how to get rid of the blue cast.
Even more, you gave me a new look to some details I used not to notice before.
So what I did in this version – got rid of the blue cast on the leading edge of the wing and the head by reducing the colors of blue and green on this area and boosting warmth a bit.
I played a bit with the eye of the bird to make it more bright. Reduced the brightness of that spot on the head and gave it a bit more contrast.
Also I saturated the whole image a little more. All done to the RAW file in Capture NX. I used Photoshop only to resize and save for web.
What I tried to do is not to repeat the results all of you posted but to show the scene as I remembered and keep it as natural looking as possible.
Still, if you see something which might be corrected, shoot!
Thanks for your support,
Kalin
P.S.
Diane, I checked the Embed Color Profile option when saving for web. Is it OK now?
Yes, the profile is there. Looks like Capture NX will do a good job for you. My post above looks overexposed and yours maybe a bit dark -- somewhere in between might be good. Check the histogram for guidance more than the monitor appearance. Good job on the blues!
Processing is a constant learning process. When I look back at old images I almost always see something to be improved.
Thank you Diane!
This might be a dumb question but I am gonna ask anyway - what should the right histogram look like?
This is what I have. Can you tell me what is out of order?
I may try to overexpose by a third of a stop.
There are no dumb questions here. Nobody was born knowing this stuff!
The most important things a histogram shows is at both ends -- whether the darks are blocked up or the light blown out -- which means there is no detail in either case. Sometimes that's what you want, but usually it's not. The dark end looks good here -- there wouldn't be any dark blacks in this image. The highlight end (right end) could be moved a little to the right, but doing that and still keeping detail in the whites on the head is a little advanced. I don't know how NX handles it. There is a lot of capability for highlight detail in LR/Adobe Camera Raw, but usually the final touches will be in PS.
Bringing up the lightest tones will give the image more contrast and punch, but you don't want to go too far. The middle of the histogram indicates the overall exposure. It's well centered here, but with a primarily dark subject, it might be moved a little to the right.
There is no right or wrong for the shape of the histogram, it just reflects the tonalities in the image. Having both ends pulled in from the sides of the box indicates a lower contrast image, which may be OK.
kalin,
Greetings. It's been a while since I've used Capture NX 2 but I fired it up again to remind myself (I used to use CNX regularly for processing my D3 images as you are). The quick fix window shows a tone curve that increases contrast in the blacks and whites at the expense of substantially reducing contrast throughout the midtones. If you will compare the underside of the wings between Diane's repost and your repost you will see the decrease in contrast. The shape of the tone curve applied is known as a reverse-s curve. An s-curve (brights are brighter, darks are darker) is frequently applied to increase contrast through the midtones and would more typically be used here.
The quick fix window as shown is the equivalent of a curves adjustment in Photoshop. It is a very complex tool to use (often can have unintended consequences).
Diane, maybe you could recommend a good tutorial on curves?
Keep working at it. There are a lot of skills involved in good pp, but lots of rewards, too.
Cheers,
-Michael-
Hi Kalin I really like your repost and I like the fact you took all the suggestions and used them to find your own path to create the image as you envision it. Well done
Don Lacy
You don't take a photograph, you make it - Ansel Adams
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs - Ansel Adams
http://www.witnessnature.net/
https://500px.com/lacy
I can't think of a Curves tutorial just now, but the basic sound advice is keep it Linear (i.e. no effect) or just barely to the side of increasing contrast -- the opposite of the curve shown above, where the bottom part is pulled down and the top part pulled up. It is very powerful and should be just barely adjusted in most cases. There are very good adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW or LR to do that sort of "local contrast decrease" to the raw file, and then go to PS for things like "local" or "masked" decreasing bright areas or lightening dark areas. The Nik Color Efex plug in for Detail Extractor can be a powerful tool if used carefully, but it will increase noise.
PS is an extremely valuable tool and worth getting into.
Thank you all! It's great to find so many ideas and advices. I will keep trying to improve my photos. I will try to get deeper into LR, too, it looks that it has a lot to offer.
Thanks again,
Kalin
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