Green Cay Nature Center
Boynton Beach, Florida
August 15, 2017, 6pm
Canon 80D
Canon 100-400mm
400mm Focal Length
1/8000
F/8
ISO 800
Cropped some from left, right, and top and changed format to 16/9 aspect ratio.
Would have liked more room under the feet.
Removed a stick in the foreground.
Software- ACDSEE Ultimate 10.
Exposure not adjusted.
Tried a version with darkened background, but then the legs disappeared and that looked funny.
Not sure how to create sharp reduced jpegs.
I like the landing pose and fully stretched wings. Why were you at 1/8000? That's an extremely fast shutter speed. Think that it pretty badly underexposed the egret. Also not sure what happened but your whites are grayish blue and not white. I did the following to your shot:
Added .5" canvas to the bottom, used the recatangular marquee tool and then did a content aware fill
Did a crude selection of the bird and increased the brightness +10
I put the bird on its own layer. Lowered the opacity to 12% and dodged the bird with multiple passes to gradually brighten it
Reduced the blue in hue saturation -70
In selective color I decreased the blacks in the whites -70
Did some minor noise reduction and a slight sharpening @.2 and 30
Of course these types of adjustments are best done on the original file. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.
Last edited by Isaac Grant; 12-14-2017 at 08:48 PM.
Thank you very much for taking the time to help me with this.
I was shifting shutter speeds in attempt to get correct exposures as subjects changed from dark to bright.
I really don't know what I'm doing. I was just looking at the back of the camera to check exposures.
I didn't even really understand histograms until I watched many of Arthur Morris' B&H videos on Youtube in the past few weeks.
I learned a lot from those.
The raw image on my Dell 4k monitor looks almost as white as the one you adjusted.
I looked at the histogram in the raw file and it's mostly bunched up on the left, which I just learned is the opposite of what gives the best image with the most data.
I think the lost white and blue cast happened when I made the reduced jpeg.
I have no idea the best way to make a good jpeg reduction.
Do you export a tiff from the raw file, then make the reduced jpeg from that?
In the ACDSEE photo editor software that I use, I see lots of different options for jpegs.
Not sure which one works best.
I don't have photoshop, so I don't know how to do all those adjustments you described.
That's really a great feature in photoshop to be able to add canvas.
I would think that your histogram is mostly to the left because the water is very dark and that is the majority of the image. As presented the histogram on the whites is on the dark side as well. Can't speak for the RAW.
You should download DPP from the Canon Website. It is free. You just need the serial number of your camera. Do all of your RAW conversion in DPP. Then convert to a TIFF and open in Photoshop. Once you have finished editing the image you can adjust the image size as desired and then sharpen the resized image. Then save that as a jpeg. Image quality will not suffer at all. All of this is covered in what I recommend you get below.
Allow me to spend some of your money. Pay for the Adobe Creative Cloud. It is like $10 per month. I highly doubt that you will regret it. Then buy yourself at least 2 guides that are on Artie's site. The DPP guide is fantastic as is the Professional Post Processing Guide. You really should spend a great deal of time learning Photoshop as it will make huge improvements in you output. I would also great recommend buying Arites 2 Digital Basics guides to really give yourself a kickstart on understanding Photoshop. The information in these guides is invaluable to help learning layers, cloning, sharpening, noise reduction and so on. In all these things only cost a few hundred dollars but you will be able to produce much higher quality photos so I think it is money very well spent. I already know Photoshop pretty well but still bought the DPP guide and the Professional Post processing guide and use the workflow in those on mostly every image.
I don't know your program so can't speak to how to produce a high quality jpeg for web presentation. But I can assure you that that info is covered in those guides. It took me about 2 minutes max to make the changes that I described. Took far long to type how I did it then do it. You have spent thousands on your camera and lens. The few hundred that you spend on learning how to process your files will be far more valuable to your finished photos.
Thank you for your advice.
I am here to learn and I'm learning much already.
The photographers' images here are stunning and I know this is the best place to learn.
I think all the pros are using photoshop and I will dive in and start learning that software.
I also will get Artie's guides too.
Snowy Egret
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You have spent thousands on your camera and lens. The few hundred that you spend on learning how to process your files will be far more valuable to your finished photos.
