'm wondering if this is heavily processed, cropped or if you did a blur of the background?
The upper wing looks odd to me right around the middle of the wing and the lower wingtips seem blurred by something other than motion. The are a lot of little green and red dots in these areas.
All that said, I still really like the pose and composition.
I like the pose and look back. While the BG is very interesting it fights for attention with the bird. I agree that the wing tips look somewhat overprocessed.
Love the action you captured in this image Jay and the head turn towards the camera but I agree about the BG. It does fight for your attention and yeas the wings look a little overprocessed but that can be changed. Overall nice shot and great timing !!
Hmm..basically this is my workflow. Adjusting the levels, shadow recovery, increase the contrast. Created multiple layer for sharpening. Combine layers. Magnetic lasso to select bird, then inverse select, denoise on BG. Maybe the magnetic lasso doesnt cut it in doing the selection, and after denoising, the whole thing looks wierd? The wings in original aint that sharp with some motion blur. Image is about 70% of frame. Any suggestions to improve this is very appreciated. :)
I have found that noise filters have to be used judiciously. The softing around the wings most likely comes from them. If you can isolate the bird to a layer before applying noise filters to BG (or vis versa) it might work better. If you have CS3 try the new magic wand selection tool and then run select "inverse" to capture what you want to edit.
Last edited by Bill McCrystyn; 01-24-2008 at 11:41 AM.