Spoonbill portrait

[Adhika Lie]

After looking at Glennie's background painting, I am quite motivated to work on this image. I also think I might have gone a little too much, I wonder if you all feel the same. This photo is FF, f/8, 1/250, ISO 800, at 500mm. Processed in LR first with pretty much taking the highlight all the way down -100 and bring up the white level at around +42. Clean up was done on Affinity Photo (PS equivalent) and some more dodging and burning and also HSL masking on the bottom foliage to obtain similar green hue with the top. It's a shame that this was shot through some foliage and thus the tip of the bill is somewhat smudged by OOF foliage, but I was not too bothered.

Original image:

[Diane Miller]

Wow -- a very cool image! I love sponbills. And great to see the starting point -- wonderful cleanup.

I don't know how Affinity works, but in PS it would be possible to do a quick mask selection of darker parts of the lower bill (horseshoe-shaped) and bring up the darkest tones by moving the LL points on a Curve to the right. Do for each color channel to neutralize the dark tones. Then bring up the middle point on the RGB channel as needed to lighten any mid-tones that got too dark. Here I would do another layer for the part that didn't go dark enough, or else go further with darkening and brush with "gray" on the mask for areas that went too dark. (Black brush at partial opacity.)

Quick and dirty here but you can see the idea.

[Adhika Lie]

Diane, is that effectively increasing the contrast on the lower part of the bill? I had the idea of bringing down the green/yellow saturation to neutralize the green and then increase contrast but laziness got the better of me.

[Diane Miller]

Yes, but increasing it from the dark end instead of the more general contrast adjustment, which both darkens darks and lightens lights. And I drew a very narrow u-shaped mask to mostly just affect the darkest parts of the edge of the bill. By being a little more specific in targeting tonalities I can be a little more sloppy in the mask, but I think your idea would also work. And of course with a mask on an adjustment layer, I can tweak it any time, both the adjustment and the mask. It might look OK until I decided to do some other adjustment above it and then it might need some further work.

[Adhika Lie]

Thanks, Diane! I am gonna give that a try. I think curve is quite powerful as you can be quite specific in the tonality but the degrees of freedom there is quite daunting, I have to say. I hope the BG work does not look too fake.

[Diane Miller]

BG looks so wonderful that I forgot to mention it. Would not have known you changed anything.

[Adhika Lie]

Very subtle change here with great impact, thanks to Diane's suggestion!

[Diane Miller]

Yeah!!!

[Michael Thompson]

Wow, the colors in that spoonbill are awesome. the ones I see are more pale usually. Nice job getting close, and fixing the end of the bill

[Glennie Passier]

Adhika, BG is awesome! You've done a very good job. And I would not have known if you didn't tell us. I think it's a handy tool to have up our sleeve.

This has been an interesting thread. When I first read it, I thought, "Oh, that's an easy fix". Well I took it into PS and had a play, first with the Saturation layer as you mentioned. It just looked a bit too ordinary. With Diane's method it looks good...of course. I just wonder if the bottom of the bill could do with a bit of extra sharpening?

Lovely bird Adhika!

[Adhika Lie]

Thanks Glennie & Michael. Indeed, fixing that bill is not as easy as it looks like. I had a few iterations before coming to this one.

Wow, the colors in that spoonbill are awesome. the ones I see are more pale usually. Nice job getting close, and fixing the end of the bill

Michael, I think there is something to do with the breeding plumage as well. They were very active when I was there (mid March).