Dancing Tricolor Heron

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

These are do put on quite a show and it is a real trest to watch them dance to and fro in search of the next meal.

Nikon D300
Nikon 300mm F2.8
ISO 400
1/1000, F7.1

All comments are appreciated. Thanks !

[Maxis Gamez]

Hi Judy,

Lovely wings and reflection. I've been following your images for a while and most of them have the "outline" around the bird. Do you think there is a possibility you getting that effect directly from the camera? or perhaps some kind of masking you are doing?

I'm just curious.

Thanks!

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Thanks Maxis for your comments. It must be something with the camera as I have done very little editing and definitely no masking. What in the camera settings could cause this Maxis ????? Never have experienced this in the past six years and to be honest I can not see it.

[Randy Stout]

Judy:

Lovely pose. I might be tempted to crop in a bit from the right to remove the biggest part of the reflection in the upper right hand corner. I wish the water was all the same color, but you have to work with what is there.

I can't see an outline on this image, but I am viewing it on a laptop, and Maxis probably is looking at a bigger monitor.

Randy

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Maxis I also save my images for the web in sRGB and I have no idea why this one was not . Perhaps an oversight on my part. I do see the lines in the morph image but that I believe that was caused because I had forgotten to change the high ISO when we arrived at the pier. Many thanks for your comments Maxis.

[Adams Serra]

Hi Judy,
Beautiful image, wing position and reflection are very nice.
I can't see any outline in this image.
It was nice meeting you yesterday.

Adams

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Cool pose, reflection and the details look good, too. I have been noticing these lines, too, and assumed they are maybe due to how you select the image for sharpening.

[Matt Lerer]

Hey Judy,

Fun morning huh! It was so much fun shooting this tri-color with you and my dancing shots weren't as good as this one of yours...great job!

[Craig Markham]

I noticed the same thing in one of my images (hippos) after I posted it in the wildlife forum yesterday. One of the commenters increased the sharpening, which made the outlines more noticeable. I went back and checked my original RAW image in DPP and could see no evidence of the outlines there. I began suspecting that they were being generated during the RAW-JPG conversion. However, I checked my full-sized JPG from the conversion, and the problem wasn't there either. It finally showed up when I used Paintshop Pro 10 to downsize the image for posting on BPN. You can see the outlines more distinctly if you do an extreme oversharpening in DPP. I haven't figured out how to prevent this resizing artifact yet, but I think this narrows down the likely cause of the problem.
-- Craig

[bill kominsky]

Hi Judy first let me say I do not see any line around the image on my monitor and think the image is
wonderful as shown, the little nits are to little to bother with nicely done.

[Beth Goffe]

I remember this guy! I haven't gotten a good look at mine to see if any hold up against yours although I have a feeling I'll end up feeling like Matt. :p I do like this feeding action. I don't see the lines in this image although they are more clear in Maxis' example. It was great shooting with you this week!

[arash_hazeghi]

The halos are down sample artifact, the program that you are using to resize your images for web is using a linear or nearest neighbor method which creates halo artifacts. If you use PhotoShop and bicubic method it will be gone :)

[Arthur Morris]

Lovely image with a great reflection and imae design. My tired old eyes do not see the outline in either image. What bugs me is that with the wing blur the reflection looks sharped than the bird.

[Arthur Morris]

The halos are down sample artifact, the program that you are using to resize your images for web is using a linear or nearest neighbor method which creates halo artifacts. If you use PhotoShop and bicubic method it will be gone :)

Thanks Arash for sharing your technical expertise.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Hi Arash, Thank you for the information you posted. It has been a real puzzle to me and I appreciate your help.

[Ramon M. Casares]

Lovely image, I like the pose and the reflection, I would only try to remove the plants reflection in the URC. COngratulations!

[Alfred Forns]

Stunning image Judy Like it as presented !!

... can't see the outline? Not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing?

[Phil Liew]

Judy, that is a perfectly timed image. Although the wing tips are not sharp, it does show motion in my book. "Moonwalking" by MJ comes to mind!

[Maxis Gamez]

Peter,

Good advice. I like Judy's work but the outline are a lot in her images and I thought would be a good idea to help out. Amazing that some people can see it and some don't!!!

Thanks!

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Hi Maxis. I still do not understand as I have not changed any settings on my camera and I did not have this appearing before. There have been a few suggestions. Peter mentioned the settings in the camera others have mentioned the sharpening method. I use photokit sharpener and I have for over a year now with out any problems so I am still confused as to what you think it is. I can see the line on the morph but still do not see it on the tricolor. Thanks !

[Maxis Gamez]

Judy,

PM me your email and I'll try to help you the best I can.

Thanks!

[Maxis Gamez]

Peter,

This shows exactly what I'm talking about!! :D

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

I did not do any editing to this image except to bring it up in raw and sharpen it having changed a setting in photokit sharpener which I use from CS3. I took it up to 400 % and could not see any lines. Also it was set for bicubic so there was no need to change.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Sorry forgot to add the image.

[Maxis Gamez]

Hi Judy,

Got you PM. perhaps you should mention here what you told me about your sharpening software settings for everyone to learn from. I'm glad I was able to point out the issue and perhaps will helps others that were not to able to identify it.

your repost looks better.

thanks!

[Fabs Forns]

Of course enlarging a jpeg to more than 100% is going to show lines.
Judy, I much prefer your original.

[Fabs Forns]

Excellent observations Maxis. I have had similar experiences when I fiddled with the picture styles in camera. Talking from Canon, the default picture style is 3,0,0,0 for sharpness, contrast, saturation and color tone. In particular (increased) contrast and sharpness had a negative effect on the out of camera image quality: you better do this selectively using PS.

Not sure I understand, Peter, please explain.
I thought the picture settings only applied to the jpg we see in the back of the monitor, unless you are capturing jpgs.
If you use RAW, it will not affect the original capture.

If I got this wrong, would appreciate the explanation :)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

The outer line in the repost is gone but I would sharpen the bird a bit more.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Peter i have not ever had a problem with a line around the image and I have been editing for many years without any . I download in Photomechanic the raw files and then they are brought up in Phoptoshgop CS3 and that is where I do all or what little editing is necessary and then save them in Tiff as well. These images are not sharpened Next I size the image for the web and then I sharpen the image. My workflow has worked beautifully and the only thing I can say is that in the sharpening process something got changed somewhat since I have just been sent a new apple computer from apple as there were several problems with the old one .. The new system has leopard where as the old was tiger. I appreciate your thoughts but all that you have mentioned I am already doing . I do appreciate all the time and effort you have spent in trying to get to the bottom of this problem. I have just posted another image today and I don't believe there are any lines in this one. Let me know what you think.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to comment and for their excellent suggestions and ideas. BPN is definitely the best !!!

[arash_hazeghi]

Nice, this new one has no artifacts :)