I like the pose, soft light and BG. The bird looks quite oversharpened and there are strong artifacts in the BG. How did you process the image? At ISO 400 it should look much cleaner.
Axel nailed it: way oversharpened and noisy to boot. I like the COMP. Nice chatting today; thanks for your call and for your kind words about BPN.
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Thanks for your comments. I almost didn't post this without reprocessing because of the over sharpening (CS2). The picture is heavy cropped and the background was processed in Noise Ninja. I have to admit I was a little careless when applying the noise brush and put some artifacts back around the bird. I think the strong artifacts are a result of heavy crop. Comments regarding this would be appreciated.
If you take the unsharpened TIFF file, try the magic wand tool, click on the BG, then inverse and use 'smart sharpen' 120, 0.3 and lens blur, then modify the selection by expanding 3 pixels and blur the BG with 2.0 pixels. That should result in a much more pleasing image.
Thanks for the tips. My Photoshop experience is very limited. Thanks to kind help from BPN members and materials available from Artie, skills are improving. I have been the king of Photoshop sliders with little to no knowledge of all the numerical values. I will reprocess using your tips and repost in a couple of days.
Certainly don't mind at all - I appreciate it. As stated earlier, BPN has been a great learning asset. Your version really shows how much attention the original needs - WOW !!!
Hi David
is simple, just open your image in PS and click control J, then you will have duplicated your image, once you do this, then use the magic wand and select the BG, since we want to work on it first, then select inverse, sounds weird right? you do this by right clicking on the BG, then you select the eraser tool E, erase the bird, now, you will see how the bird disappears on the Layer 1, but not in the picture you are working right now. Then click on the magic wand again and right click the BG, click deselect.
Now go to Filter, blur, Gaussian blur and pick something around 1-2 pixels. You click OK and go to your right on the screen, here you can see the two images of your bird, click background, ok, is time to work on the bird now, just saturate the image a bit or sharpen it or makes it look blur, is up to you what you want to do here, then go to Layer, all the way down, and click Flatten Image,
Note: this is what I would do, but I am sure there are many talented photographers and PS experts that would make it better, any suggestions? My ears are open and all extra information is very welcome.
This is the version I was going to originally post but at the last minute decided to crop for portrait. It wasn't a good idea since the results left a lot to be desired. I had overlooked the sharpening that was unintentionally applied in Noise Ninja. Won't let happen again.