Nelson's Sparrow

[Simon d'Entremont]

This Nelson's Sparrow conveniently sat on a perch with a few hundred yards behind him as background. Not much needed in processing, all done in Lightroom: adjusted levels, added clarity and vibrance, sharpening, lowered highlights due to bright sun, and cleaned up the perch a bit from a couple of twigs sticking out. The cropping was outside the normal ratios due to the right leg being so far back (putting the head a bit higher than I would have liked), but manageable.

Canon 7DII
500mm f4 II shot @ f5
ISO 200
1/1000
shot from the car on a beanbag

Any advice welcomed.

Simon

[Isaac Grant]

Sweet picture of the subvirgatus subspecies of Nelson's Sparrow. We don't get too many of them coming through New York City. Get mostly nelsoni so it is nice for me to see this. Nice perch and the background is perfect, especially for this species. You are lucky to have him perch up for you. I would prefer to have the bird farther to the right in the frame and give him more room to look into. Something about the color seems a bit off to me. Perhaps it is because do not see too many of these but the bird seems to have a a bit of a red cast to it. Details are nice but I feel it could be sharpened a little more as well.

[Simon d'Entremont]

Thanks Isaac. I tried to reduce the reds and nothing happened so not sure what that might be. I did take your cropping advice, and added some more sharpening. That being said, my original was much sharper than what uploaded. Even after the 1200 pixel and 400kb limit is applied, they are sharper on my monitor before I upload them and I loose quality in the upload process. Any advice on this? In any event, here's a re-do based on your suggestions.

[David Salem]

Nice looking frame and I really like the clean look to this bird. He keeps himself up well. The pose is great and gives his profile to the sensor so everything looks in focus and clear. Nice HA and eye contact too.
I did't think the OP looked to bad in the way of detail but I did agree with the crop being to centered.
Your repost looks good and the feather details are right at the edge of getting crunchy, although they aren't yet so this should be a good example for you to judge your sharpening. This would be as far as I would go.

As for sharpening for the web, I make a JPEG from a finished processed TIFF file in PS that is reduced to the web posting parameters (1200px@400k for this site) Then I use "export save for web".
Then save it to your desktop. Now bring that saved JPEG back into PS and use smart sharpen at .5 diameter at 80-120% to only the bird. Now do the same thing and hit "export save for web", make sure the file haven't gotten larger, and then click letting it know that you want to replace the file with the new one. That should do it. Also you can preview your post before you finalize it to check what it looks like.
Hope this helps

[Arthur Morris]

Beautiful bird, image, and BKGR. The only problem here is that the bird is leaning to the far side of the plane of the perch... This gives the pose an awkward look.

exP, SH and image quality excellent as noted above.

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[Simon d'Entremont]

I agree Art.


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[Simon d'Entremont]

Thanks David. Have you ever tried to export from Lightroom and use the output sharpening feature? Is there a reason that method doesn't seem to work well for me?

[David Salem]

Thanks David. Have you ever tried to export from Lightroom and use the output sharpening feature? Is there a reason that method doesn't seem to work well for me?

Simon,

I don't think that the LR output sharpening is the best sharpening method for what we are doing. I'm sure it's global and will create more noise in the BG as it sharpens everything.
I had a friend that was using that method to post images in BPN in the beginning and he found that he wasn't getting the sharp details in his posts that he was hoping for.
I am pretty sure he is now doing what I mentioned to you and no one tells him that his images might need some more sharpening. Not discounting the output sharpener but all I know is what works for me.
Hope this helps

[Simon d'Entremont]

Simon,

I don't think that the LR output sharpening is the best sharpening method for what we are doing. I'm sure it's global and will create more noise in the BG as it sharpens everything.
I had a friend that was using that method to post images in BPN in the beginning and he found that he wasn't getting the sharp details in his posts that he was hoping for.
I am pretty sure he is now doing what I mentioned to you and no one tells him that his images might need some more sharpening. Not discounting the output sharpener but all I know is what works for me.
Hope this helps

So David, do I take from this that the critical issue is that sharpening needs to be done after resizing?