This is the closest I have ever been able to get to one of these in the wild. I managed to get off a few shots before it flew away.
Canon 7d - Handheld - 400mm f/5.6 lens - ISO 400 - f/5.6 - 1/500 sec
LR : Highlights -100, shadows +19, whites +25, blacks -25, clarity +10, vibrance +10, and saturation +10
PS : tone layer adjustment and smart sharpened
Great portrait! And the perfect highlight in that rusty eye. It looks as if you're close enough to smell its foul breath. Personal preference on my part says to crop a bit from the right. A fine image. TFS.
Lovely portrait Jack. A face only a mother could love. The blacks look good to me. I'm not familiar with the birds colouring, so unable to comment on his caruncles colouring. His beak looks a little bright in parts.
Well done Jack. Certainly a bird I would'not like to come face to face with.
Wonderful!!! I always think vultures are thinking, "You're not actually going to take my picture, are you?" But this guy looks pretty pleased about it.
Maybe a bit hot on the beak -- I'd see if there is more leeway to bring the brightest tones down a bit, and the shadows up on the head -- under the chin and around the ear.
Did you lighten the body? My preference would be to have it darker in keeping with the edge-burning idea to keep the viewer's eye on the face.
I'd also take some off the right. Wonderful colors, though!
You created a dark area behind the neck. Always good to toggle an adjustment on and off (or go back and forth in history) to see things clearly. The adjustment brush in LR can be imprecise. I sometimes use it for things like a graduated filter, but even there it's glued into the file when you go to PS. So I prefer to save local adjustments for PS, where they remain as editable layers. There you could do a better job of masking for the dark feathers.
Nik's Viveza can be amazing for selecting areas for adjustment.
Also, a common adjustment for an avian image is to darken the pupil, which can go too light. Forget to mention that before.
I did away with the shadow adjustments and went to use dodge and burn in photoshop. It was my first time using this and I really liked it. I am pretty happy with the result.
The feathers look nice but there is still some dark halo behind the upper body that slopped out into the BG. The Dodge and Burn tools, although improved in the last few years, still directly change pixels so aren't reversible. Try this:
But Nik's Viveza will do all the masking for you, usually with amazing precision even on very OOF branches. Do the adjustment on the area you want and it will slop over. Cancel that with several adjustment points in the areas of the slop-over, but make no adjustments to them -- just click the points. That will narrow down the adjustment to the tones you want.
Black Vulture
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