Eyeing the meal plan...

[David Roach]

EOS R EF 400DO I f11 1/1300 ISO 1600

[Chris van Rooyen]

Lovely diagonal composition, great light, perfect background and excellent feather detail and sharpness. It's only the that eye seems a bit lifeless to me?

[Dorian Anderson]

Sharpness is great, but the blacks look really washed out. The lack of eye contact is tough. Shame because the perch is interesting...

[Isaac Grant]

Nice details and nice perch. Nice background as well. You have all the hard parts down for a good songbird image. But the image lacks good eye contact and as Dorian said the colors are very washed out.

[Bill Dix]

Love the comp and perch. Ditto the comments above. It might be possible to add a few points of black to the neutrals, lighten the iris and darken the pupil. Even if that doesn't give you direct eye contact it might give the image a bit more life.

[Isaac Grant]

Went back and did the following:Roughly selected the bird and perch (missed spots on perch) and ran auto tone at 100%. Then I reduced the blues -60. Then I ran some detail extractor on the bird and perch at 25%. Plus I went into selective color and added about 40 points of cyan to the reds to tone down the red in the wing. Then in hue/saturation I lowered the reds -20. Blacks are deeper and better now, reds more tamed. As always it is much better to do this on the full res file. Also I would likely make adjustments to the perch separately and differently but was mostly concerned with the blacks and not the perch.

[David Roach]

Thanks to all for comments suggestions and learnings as usual. Your repost looks much better Isaac. It has taken me this many months to find sweet spots on all the varied converter/lens combos with this new rig in the field. Obviously, I need to get into PP much more and the guides I have from Artie and Arash along with the likes of Isaac and others real time teaching will get me there (I hope). Yes, I did lighten the eye and darken the pupil already as there is no catch light with this beauty looking down at it's meal. In fact, the three bright spots in the eye and the ones on the bill are from this beauty just tearing into one of these buds. Thanks again to all!!
Peace,
David

[Isaac Grant]

One of the real bummers about digital photography is that you have to spend so much time in front of the computer. I like being out and in the field, but if you want your images to be really strong, capturing the image is only part of the battle. Have to really refine processing skills to get all that you can out of the images. Have to learn how to subtly enhance images with proper processing. Artie and Arash's guides are excellent tools for getting started. I still spend a good amount of time working on ways to process images. Try different things in different ways and see what gets what type of results. Always talk shop with people to see if there is any new trick or something that I can learn and can use to enhance my images. After having switched to Nikon I have had to learn new techniques as well as I can no longer use DPP for processing RAW files. Point is that I am always trying to learn and get better so you are not alone David.

[John Mack]

Agree with what has been said. I like the this frame though. Nice and sharp with interesting perch.