early morning piping plover

[allanrube]

I shot this adult shortly after the sun came out. The bird stands out quite well from the wet sand which has a blue cast I find interesting. I had gone to this site (Plum Island) 0looking for chicks, but no one I knows has seen any since storms and a high tide over a week ago.
D300 600 VR with 1.4 tc. (Auto) ISO 320. 1/500 at f5.6 with 0EV.

[Arthur Morris]

Quite loverly with a perfect choice of perspective so that we can see the footsies. Lowering the contrast a bit would likely make it a bit more pleasing.

[allanrube]

Thanks Artie. The light was harsh even at 50 a.m. In a way it looks like I used flash, which I did not. I lowered the contrast and then darkened the image a tiny bit.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Pretty cool angle, light and perspective. I would tone down the whites even more.

Too bad they didn't succeed in raising their offspring.

[Kobus Tollig]

Looks great to me now. Maybe just run some NR on the BG. Well done

[Randy Stout]

Allan:

Very nice feeling. I suspect that there were some blown areas in the whites and you were able to pull the histogram back from the right edge by lowering the contrast. The brightest white I could find was 248, but there is def. loss of detail in some of the whites. If you haven't already, you might try reconverting this in ACR and see if you can preserve a bit more of the detail in the whites.

Generally I prefer to have the lighting even across the whole bird, and not have the feet/legs for example in the shadow, but for me it works here because it reinforces the early morning feel with the sun just peeping over the horizon.

Cheers

Randy

[David Fletcher]

Great contrast between the warm light on the bird and sand. Nice shot!

[Doug Rodda]

What an unusual, and pleasing BG.

[allanrube]

Here is a question based on Randy's comment. As he says there are a few areas with no detail in highlight. I do not use ACR but shoot in raw and use Nikon Capture NX. When I opened the image I checked for blown highlights - none showed. I then checked the histogram which would show areas where the screen is 255 - no showed.
I put watch points - see image below - on 3 areas that seemed very bight but you can see they all showed 246-47.
Any suggestions as to what I should have done with the raw image in NX? When I took the image, the r, g, and b histograms looked o.k.

[Randy Stout]

Allan:

Thanks for your detailed reply. I use NX2, so am very familiar with NX as well. It looks like you did everything right. Did you check for any blown highlights when you converted the file to jpeg? Did you resharpen for the web, and if so, did you recheck for blown highlights afterwards?

I would have expected to have seen blown areas in the histogram of the jpeg which I checked, if you had problems in the last two steps I mentioned, and I did not.

I then checked the histogram of the jpeg with CS4, I found there was a tiny spike of red just shy of the right edge (253 or 254), which didn't show up in NX2. Always interesting to see how the different programs display information.

Will be curious what others think on this one!

Thanks

It is a very nice photo.

Randy

[Axel Hildebrandt]

In morning light like this I tone down the highlights more than usual to be able to see details in the whites rather than going by the numbers only.

[Fabs Forns]

This is cause by the warm light blowing the red channel. Compression for web makes it more noticeable.
I think looking for a couple of blown pixels in an early morning image is overkill.

[allanrube]

Fabs, If the red channel is overblown why doesn't it show that in NX? Nothing in the red channel is over 248.

[Fabs Forns]

Fabs, If the red channel is overblown why doesn't it show that in NX? Nothing in the red channel is over 248.

That's my point, Allan. Numbers don't lie :)
There's a few pinkish looking areas. compared to the rest of the plumage. It could also be added with curves.

[allanrube]

Fabs, I am confused. You say numbers don't lie. Does that simply mean there are details there that I should be able to bring out? I ask because I do not see how - yet from all I have learned - if the 3 channels are below 255- like 246, 237, 209 - some detail should be there.

[Randy Stout]

Allan:

I looked at your image when I got home. Although the work monitor is calibrated to the same standard, the home monitor is better quality (NEC 2690wuxi2). I am seeing fewer issues with the whites, but there still is the impression of lost detail. As I have mentioned several times, it is a lovely image overall, but the loss of detail did stand out to me, so that is why I mentioned it.

Randy

[Jim Fenton]

Allan...

IMHO, NX lies or at least doesn't agree with CS4.

In this case, those hot spots look blown to me.

The red channel is an issue when shooting in warm light such as this.

By using the NearUniWB preset, you bring up the mid tones and shadows but in warm light...watch out on the upper end. You can't have it all given the DR of the equipment.

I really think that if you utilized control points in NX, you could recover more of this detail and drop the exposure on those particular hot spots since to my eyes, they really stand out.

Want to fix them easily? Go over them at lowered opacity with the patch tool from an area that it's so hot. Not that I ever do that of course :)

[Arthur Morris]

My two cents. I worked on this for ten minutes using all of my tricks but the strip of white on the flank came out looking like detail-less white enamel with a yellow tinge.... I would try reconverting it darker with less SAT and starting over....

[allanrube]

That is what I will do - go back to raw - try reducing exposure - then using d-lighting - will let people know my results.

[allanrube]

O.K. - back to raw. I gave it -1/3 ev with highlight recovery. This improved the hot areas. I then went to d-lighting and brought back the shadows. In PS, I darkened neutrals +2. Then I did an auto-contrast, reducing that to about 30%. The tiff looks a little better than this jpeg.

[Fabs Forns]

Terrific, Allan!

[Stu Bowie]

Sweet light Allan,sharp, and love the angle. Your repost works so much better. Well done.

[Arthur Morris]

The repost is a huge improvement. What do you use to convert?

[allanrube]

Art - I use Nikon NX 2.

Thanks for the suggestions and bearing with me on this one.

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks Alan, No can help with NX2. Does it have anything like a Recovery Slider? If not, you may wish to check out the ACR tutorial in the ER. The big advantage of the Recovery slider is that it pulls details from the whites without darkening the entire image. And since I am pushing more to the right lately, that is a huge advantage. I now use ACR for 95% of my conversions....

[Axel Hildebrandt]

The repost looks much better. If you want the BG to be a little lighter (as in the original) that could be done without too much effort.

[allanrube]

NX does have a "quick fix" section where you can adjust exposure, with additional slides for contrast, highlight and shadow protection, and saturation. That is what I first used when I went back to my raw file.

[Randy Stout]

Allan:

Nice job on the repost. I find the highlight protection slider in NX2 is def. helpful, but has limits to what it can save. I will do some comparisons with ACR on the same image and see if one has a significant advantage.

I believe that your image is a good example of the fact that the final test for any image is how it looks to the observer. Even though the numbers tell us it should look great, our eyes say that it is lacking detail and too hot in that one area. So, unless we are posting our images for a computer to admire, go with your eyes over the numbers!

Randy

[Morkel Erasmus]

great shot to begin with, but the repost shows that a little work and sometimes starting over can take an image from great to outstanding. no techs from me - I'm learning a lot from all these threads, just adding my well done!

[Gyorgy Szimuly]

Repost is fantastic but the whole idea is fantastic. Your opportunity is well exploited. Dark surrounding and the sun is on the bird. Well done.

Szimi

[allanrube]

Yes, the repost is much better and it is because of the give and take here. I went back to raw on the rest of the shots I made that morning. Here is another one I like.

[Juan Aragonés]

The image is outstanding Allan, I really love the pose and light. I agree that the whites seems a bit hot in the flanks but I am not sure about the reason why. I checked the image in CS4 and the red channel show some blown pixels but very few (in fact, only 22 pixels are in the level 255) and in my opinion that is not a good amount of hot pixels for causing the muddy/hot look of the flank. Maybe it is due to the RAW conversion into jpeg. I think that the best thing to be done is to made two RAW conversions of the file, one for the sahdows and one for the highlight to save as much details as possible in both extremes of the histogram. Your repost looks much better than the original.
I no longer use NX and prefer ACR so can not help with NX.

This is one of the methods that I used to detect if I have hot pixels in one of the channels. The upper part of the image is the original jpeg that you uploaded to BPN and I checked the red channel looking for hot pixels. As you can see, in the level 255 you have 22 pixels (no problems in the blue and green channels).
With this information I went to saturation and reduced the saturation of the red channel a bit (the lower part of my repost). Now, the hottest pixel in the red channel is in the level 249. Usually, this method is enought to fix problems of this kind but, to my surprise, it doesn´t works very well here and I think that is most probably due to the fact that I am using a jpeg instead of a TIFF.
I use thi smethod to identify the source of the problems. In your image, at first glance, it looked to me that the problem was in the red channel but now I think that it is best explained by the excessive contrast of the image for just one RAW conversion (two conversions are much better in this case, I think).

Once again, the repost seems OK to me.

Hope this helps

[Randy Stout]

Juan:

Nice discussion of the issues here. Thats why this is such a great place!

Randy

[allanrube]

Juan, I am not getting into making two versions yet, but I did find something intresting with the image in post 31.
I looked at my full size tiff. I had to go to 248 before I found 1 blown pixel. When I resized it to 800 pixels on the long end (with an action that does it in several steps) I found 14 hot pixels at 255. I sharpened it using high pass, no change. I save as a 12 quality jpg - still no change. When I save it for web at 90% quality there was actually an improvement - only 4 pixels at 255.
Finally, I uploaded it to smugmug, emailed it to myself, downloaded it and found 11 hot pixels at 255.

Lots of variables but it seems reisizing did the most to add hot pixels - at least in this example.

[david cramer]

It's a beautiful image, Allan. The discussion on this has been first rate. It's interesting to consider that a resize step effects color. What was the original color space on the tiff and at what step do you convert to srgb for web?

[allanrube]

David, I forgot about that. My action to resize also changes it from 16 to 8 bit and from adobe rgb to srgb.

[Juan Aragonés]

Allan I apologize, I was trying to write a reply to your post 34 and then I realized that I was writing in your own post! :o

Allan I encourage you to try the method of several RAW conversions for images with a high contrast because the result are in many cases really good. Let me know if you need some help with the matter.;)

Your findings about the relationship between the number of hot pixels and the resizing of the file is interesting and I think that can explain most part of the problem. In fact I remember some discussions here and in other forum about one image containing hot pixels in the jpeg but not in the RAW file.