Hi Massimo,
I like the capture...a few points to consider, first I would recommend on adding canvas to the left of the frame to give your bird more tail space, the focus point was not on the eye, it's on the top of the wing, thats why the eye is not sharp, the top portion of the wing is running a little on the hot side, and the under wing is under exposed, with allot of noise...there is a fair amount of noise in the entire picture, would need to run a pass of noise reduction and need to selective sharpen the eye...and would recommend on adjusting your mid-tones to lighten the water and increase the saturation and contrast levels, to give the image more impact because it's a bit flat...looking forward to your next one...:cool:
Thank you both for your comments and encouragement. This is definitely a trial-and-error process: this digital stuff, not to mention the challenge of working with birds, is definitely new territory. I am very grateful for the detailed response to the technical aspects of the image.
So--I have taken your instructions to the letter, and have reworked the picture, starting not from the RAW capture but from the "imported" version in PSE7. Here is the workflow in its entirety, and of course the resulting picture.
A:
1) I did 3 rounds of 10-strong, 100% noise reduction in PSE
2) selective-sharpened the eye: 500%, radius 0.1px, remove lens blur
3) I did the same sharpening to the entire picture
4) midtone enhancement: +15
5) saturation: +35
6) contrast: +15; brightness: +5
7) selective-sharpened the beak, same as eye
Saved the picture as maximum quality (10); baseline optimized; file size: 533.6K (uploaded version is 113K)
B:
Opened the picture in Light Room 2
Checked the histogram, which is all within "exposure" edging toward right-hand, but nothing spills into "recovery"; the yellow and red do go off the scale at the top. Passing the cursor on the white areas (top of rt. wing, trailing edge of lf. wing, tail) do read at 90% and higher--I assume this what you are referring to as "hot"? Tried playing with hue and other variables, which lowered the histogram top within range, but only got a sick-looking mess. I guess that's not fixable?
I did add one more bit of editing in LR2: I added "fill light" (+10). It made a nice effect.
I tried also a version with much higher values for contarst, saturation, midtones, etc., but all that did was show up the "softness" of the edges of the bird, both at 200% view and at 100%. Very ugly, so I quickly abandoned it.
I might add that PSE7 is telling me that the newly-cropped picture is something like 15x35 inches in size. Obviously, that's ridiculous! I assume that if it were printed at a more modest size it would look considerably better (say, at 8x17 or so?).
Is the second version better? I mean both in aesthetic terms (general appearance) and as far as technical elements go. Anything I got significantly wrong?
Hi - Gus has the techs covered -- Hot is any white area that reads at 255 - this means it is overepxosed and depending on how far over it is as to whether you can get anything back or not.
One thing I don't think was mentioned, is that if your image is about the bird's flight, or prelude to flight, you should give it somewhere to fly TO. You gave it plenty of space to LOOK into, which is good, but it doesn't say to me "this bird is about to fly"... it says "this bird is chasing others away" or "this bird is trying to keep its balance"...
I love the pose, and I think it is great that there is so much that you can do with it!
Taking off
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