This sleepy Black-bellied Plover was photographed on the morning of November 18th at Fort Desoto park in Florida with the Canon 7D mark ii and the Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS ii handheld.
ISO 200
AV f/7.1
TV 1/800
Focal Length 400mm
Manual exposure/ AI Servo/ AF point expansion / rear button focus
The AF point selected is centered to include the eye and most of the bill.
The image was processed in DPP4 and PScc. Here is a short rundown of what I did to process:
1) leveled the image
2) cropped about 5% on the left side to exclude a piece of grass
3) cleaned a specular highlight in the grass directly above the bird using the patch tool
4) used the Nik detail extractor on the bird at a reduced opacity
This is my first attempt at resizing an image from Photoshop and not LR (not sure if I got this part correct yet). Thanks for taking a look.
I like shorebird images like this. Simple and clean. I think the few grasses on the left are a nice plus.
I don't think the bird is sharp enough but that could be from how you downsized I guess? The whites of the belly look a little too gray to me and you have one hot spot on the lower flanks and one on the throat.
When you finish an image and are ready to sharpen, you should do the following.
Resize it to say 1200 x 800. Go to IMAGE > IMAGE SIZE. Then sharpen the resized image only. Then go to FILE > EXPORT > SAVE FOR WEB. Make sure you are below the 400 allowed and save. Files done this way will be considerably sharper than if you downsize the sharpened image. Just so you know I have tested using the following method. I took one image where I use DLO, then used the NIK DE, then smart sharpened the image. Then resized after sharpening. Then on the same image did the method above with no other sharpening except sharpening at .5 and 100 after reszing and that image was far better looking. More natural and also sharper. So the image with 3 levels of sharpening was less sharp after resizing then the image that was only sharpened once. Hope that helps.
Yeah Isaac, I'm going to try to redo this tomorrow. The original image is super sharp. Thanks for taking the time to spell out that process. I'm almost positive that's what I did, but as I'm just learning this, I could easily have sharpened and then image>image size and then exported that. Unfortunately the finished product here looked worse than the original. No worries, I'll redo in the morning. Thanks for helping with that.
Try #2 (not really...more like try #12). I started over from scratch, trying to follow my own recipe and made a few blunders along the way. One thing I failed to list in my initial recipe is that I had removed a second catch light in the eye with the clone stamp. In this second attempt, I toned the brightness down -.033 to bring down the whites. I think this one looks sharper than the first try. Thank you very much for pointing that out Isaac. Let's see if I got that part correct.
Black-bellied Plover smiling
Reply With Quote
