Puffin Catch

[Jory Griesman]

Machias Seal Island, New Brunswick (or Maine, if you're American)
Nikon D70s 300mm f2.8 VR with Nikon 2X Tele
f/5.6 1/1000 sec ISO 200 Exp. comp +2/3

Probably one of the best places to see and photograph Atlantic puffins in North America.

[Doug West]

I love these birds. One of these days I'm going to make it to Maine.

Maybe its just my monitor at work, but I'm seeing a slight blue
cast on the bird.

Doug

[Maxis Gamez]

This image looks a little overexpose. I agree with Doug regarding the blue cast. Perhaps one stop darker and a little more sharpening. keep them coming!

[Gautam Biswas]

Nice image, but agree with Maxis and Doug, a bit over and blue. It sure was a challenge capturing the black and blue feathers against light.

[Ian Colley]

I like the composition, I would like to see these birds one day but I guess it will never happen. Blue cast is obvious on my monitor, agree with more sharpening required.

[Jory Griesman]

Does anybody know of any tutorials or guidelines on Photoshop sharpening, especially for birds? I've got books on PS, but I still have no clue, nor can I really see the effects. I use Matt Kloskowski's guidelines for Lightroom RAW sharpening.

[Jim Poor]

Hi Jory,

First thing I did was cast out the cast:

Dupe layer | Blur > Average | Levels Adjustment layer | Grey (center dropper > click on averaged layer | Turn of visibility of Averaged layer | Adjust opacity of Levels Layer (in this case 82%)

Dupe Layer: Then reduced saturation in the red channel. (be sure to select the BG layer and not the levels layer)

Dupe Layer: Sharpened the whole bird with Smart Sharpen 100% @ .2 pixels
Then just the face at 75 % .2 pixels, then the bill at 75% .2 pixels.

I erased the black part of the eye itself to because it looked pixelated with the sharpening.

Selected the sky contracted the selection 3 pixels and then applied Gaussian Blur with a 3 pixel radius twice. It's not perfect, but should give you some ideas.

[Jim Poor]

It looks like I introduced some banding in the sky and noise in the dark areas, but starting from the original, you should be able to avoid that easily.

[Jory Griesman]

That looks much better. Thanks, Jim.