Greater Yellowlegs

[John Hawkins]

I Photographed this Greater-Yellowlegs at Blind Pass on Sanibel today. Taken at 9:10 AM with my Sony A100 and Sigma 5-500 lens.
The metadata.... f/6.3,1/500,+2.0 ev, ISO 250, 420mm, fill flash, Better Beamer. I appreciate your C&C.

Thanks,
John

[Arthur Morris]

John. You need to order a signed copy of Shorebirds; Beautiful Beachcombers this minute. And study it. This is a lovely photograph of a Short-billed Dowticher in fresh juvenal plumage. Way to go on sun angle and subject to film plane juxtaposition. And sharp. Perhaps a bit too contrasty. You might wish Patch Tool out some of the little white things on the beach and the specular highlights on the bill. All is all, well done.

Any chance of getting you to post a jpeg of the converted file before image optimization?

[John Hawkins]

I Photographed this Greater-Yellowlegs at Blind Pass on Sanibel today. Taken at 9:10 AM with my Sony A100 and Sigma 5-500 lens.
The metadata.... f/6.3,1/500,+2.0 ev, ISO 250, 420mm, fill flash, Better Beamer. I appreciate your C&C.

Thanks,
John

Here it is Artie.

[Maxis Gamez]

Hi John,

I have to agree with Artie on this all the way. You did well in photoshop. I also would like to see this at a lower angle.

Keep them coming!

PS: I also have to get me a book!

[Arthur Morris]

Thank you sir. There are over-exposed pixels in the untouched image. (Though that is not why I asked to see the ORIG...) Is this a RAW file? If yes, do you know how to go back and convert it darker??? If yes to that, please do, post that one, and leave the one above. If no, let me know what you use to convert your images.

If a J-PEG then you are out of luck until you start using RAW

The reason that I asked in the first place was because of the muddy/ugly greys in the neck and on the belly and the over-processed look to an otherwise fine image.

[Linda Robbins]

John, Artie has offered great help regarding optimizing this nice image. I just wanted to add that this is such a beautiful juvie...love their plumage at this stage.

[John Hawkins]

Artie,
I shot this in RAW. I use Aperture. I don't know much about working in RAW.

[Arthur Morris]

Please confirm that you bring your RAW file in to Aperture and then convert it to a TIFF or something similar.

Now, we need help from someone who knows Aperture... I will get in touch with Alfred Forns.

[John Hawkins]

I can fine tune my images while in the raw file. Aperture decodes RAW files using the Raw Fine Tuning area of the Adjusttments inspector. It saves the raw file as a master file and I the worked file is a jpeg.

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks John, We are getting closer. See if there is any way for you to make the image darker via a slider rather than letting Aperture do all of the adjusting. It is obviously not adjusting very well as the post of your original had over-exposed pixels... It is likely that the lost detail in the highlights can be saved... Also, you should be saving (or converting) your files to TIFF not to J-PEG. TIFF is a loss-less file. JPEG is not. Each time that you save a JPEG some image quality is lost.

If you can create a darker version, please post it here unprocessed. If not, we will need to wait for help with Aperture...

[Alfred Forns]

John I downloaded the image and processed it. The one area that looks strange is the neck of the bird. In the just converted the neck feathers look strange. Like when you decrease density in a dark area and turn it to mush.

Any work on that area just makes a darker looking mushy gray. All others come up just fine setting the white/black point in curves then small adjustment.

I gave up Aperture after the 1.5 version and went to LR. As I remember the program does not have a highlight recovery, its only LR that has it. btw are you on the latest version?

[John Hawkins]

Yes I have the latest version. I am still learning, tho I find it tough to be self teaching this. I purchased Aperture 2 Apple Certified book by Ben Long,Apple Pro Training Series to see if this helps. I am into chapter 3, just need 30 hours in a day,LOL. Thank you to Artie and yourself for taking your valuable time to give this poor novice some direction. It is very much appreciated. Do you think I would be better off with Lightroom?
John

[Arthur Morris]

All others come up just fine setting the white/black point in curves then small adjustment.

Thanks for trying to help Alfred. Are you saying that when you opened the ORIG/JPEG that there were no over-exposed pixels???

[Arthur Morris]

Yes I have the latest version. I am still learning, tho I find it tough to be self teaching this. I purchased Aperture 2 Apple Certified book by Ben Long,Apple Pro Training Series to see if this helps. I am into chapter 3, just need 30 hours in a day,LOL. Thank you to Artie and yourself for taking your valuable time to give this poor novice some direction. It is very much appreciated. Do you think I would be better off with Lightroom? John

Hi John, Obviusly the book is not helping... It seems that there is no darker or recovery options in Aperture; this is hard to fathom... You are most welcome. I like appreciative folks who like to smile. I have never used Lightroom. Are you on a MAC or a PC? If a PC, do know that I use a combo of Breezebrowser for editing and conversion and Photoshop CS3 for image optimization... All of our tutorials are based on those two programs.

Does anybody else know about Aperture?

[John Hawkins]

I have a Mac Book Pro Laptop, which I am using exclusively at moment as my Windows based PC has crashed.
Trying to decide whether to replace with an Apple PC or go with another Dell.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi John,
No help on Apeature....but i think you did pretty well with the PP.........but will agree with Maxis on his lower angle recommendation.