Project for the ETL Crew

[Doug Brown]

This is small JPG of one of my image from my 2008 Costa Rica Photo Tour. As you can see, it suffers from a number of significant problems. I thought it'd be fun to give you all a crack at post-processing the original RAW file and submitting your results here on this thread. It's a good learning exercise, and I hope you'll all give it the old college try. You can find the RAW file at the following link: http://web.mac.com/dlb/Site/BPN.html

[carole wiley]

What a wonderful idea!

[Alfred Forns]

Great idea having a link to the RAW file Doug !!!! Way to go buddy !!!

[Gail Spitler]

Since I probably have the farthest to go on post-processing skills, I'll post my attempt first. It can act as the baseline for others to improve upon I'm sure.
Nothing like trying to make a bird look real and natural when you have never seen the critter before. Was I ever surprised when the brown in the feathers popped out.
I look forward to seeing what others do with the image, and to reading comments and suggestions - and hopefully some details about how folks worked on the image.
Thanks for posing the exercise Doug

Gail
I used PSElements 6. Tried to do the straight forward things using levels, brightness/contrast, color saturation, shadows/highlights. Also deselected bird and Gausian blurred the background. Cropped out most of the green plants because I didn't know what else to do with them.

[Doug Brown]

Way to go Gail! You did a nice job, and you're definitely on the right track. You recognized that there's more than meets the eye with RAW files. It's tough to make adjustments when you don't know what the bird looks like in real life (the internet can be of assistance here). Let's see what other submissions we get; I don't want to offer suggestions because I want to see what everyone comes up with on their own. Thanks for taking a crack at it!

[Lance Peters]

Doug - I'D love to - but what is this CR2 file??? ;) Capture NX will not open it ;)

[Doug Brown]

Lance, the NEF file was not salvageable so I tossed it! ;)

[Lance Peters]

Really Doug :) What do you mean that the NEF file was PERFECT in every way shape and form and it was not useable for this RESCUE operation LOL :) :)

[Nicki Gwynn Jones]

Hi Doug,
Will post tomorrow as I really have to go to sleep now!! Thanks for your email.
Regards,
Nicki

[Lance Peters]

Well - heres my take - I like the Black BG - so left that pretty much the way it was. Made a few adjustments with ACR on the raw file before saving as a JPG - Not familiar with ACR so just fumbled my way around.

[Dave Phillips]

great exercise Doug, love doing these.....you start a trend and we will have to do this every day or so.
Not much noise in that overexposed image.

hope cropping is allowed, this may be a bit much on color sat.
Processed RAW in Capture One and recovered highlights, finished a few minor tweaks in CS2.
No touchups or cloning

[Dave Phillips]

and fuller body that I should have added canvas to top

[Nonda Surratt]

What a great idea..here's my attempt

[Desmond Chan]

I found the original lacks some important details. Light too harsh. So, I guess I may just as well fool around with it.

[gary rouleau]

Doug, here is my shot at it.

gary

[Doug Brown]

I'd like to congratulate you all on your fine work! To me the point of the exercise was to show you that all is not lost with exposures that don't look good on the surface. RAW files typically contain an enormous amount of visual data that can be extracted with good post-processing techniques. I'm sure that a number of you were surprised at how good the photo looked when you dialed down the exposure a little. Since this exercise has been well received, I'll try to do more of these in the future.

[Doug Brown]

For anyone who's interested, here's what I did with the photo.