Went out this morning to work on my exposure skills. I am working on getting my PP skills with Breezebrowser and PS up to par. This was taken with the early morning sun behind me with a Canon EOS 40D ISO 800, 1/1000, f/7.1 100-400mm at 280mm, HH. It was shot in RAW downloaded via Breezebrowser and converted to a TIFF file in Photoshop. I first ran Noise Ninja on the entire image then one more time on the BG. I adjusted levels, added some saturation, and added a little black (+3) in both the black and neutral channels in the selective color layer. I then selectively sharpened and dodged the eye just a bit. I re-sized it for BPN and used USM on the entire image. Your opinions and input are greatly appreciated.
Water is great and exposure techs look solid. Eye looks worked a tad or hard to distinguish from the head. Looks a tad sharp to me, let's see what other say. I just posted a female Mallard and set the W/B to cloudy causing a pinkish overcast on the image. I reposted with W/B set to as-is, my point is these are great subjects to practice with. I have a MacBook and it does not support BB and I use Topaz noise reduction.
Nice nature shot, well done.
Last edited by Jeff Cashdollar; 09-05-2009 at 03:29 PM.
I agree with the water looking great.. I think that the eye on the duck looks worked on, compared to the eye in the duck's reflection.. Swap the eye and drop the saturation a little and it would be first class..
Hi Nick - Its a rare occasion were I would run NR on the whole image, not saying I wouldn't do it - just wondering your reasons for doing so here?? NR smears detail and I am wondering if that is why the eye on the duck doesnt seem to be anywhere close to the reflection - usually the eye in the main should look better than the reflection.
Here it is around the other way.
Looks a tad over sharpened ant seems to be some loss of detail from the NR.
Water looks good and so does your reflection.
Keep em coming :)
Hi Nick,
I like the capture and the placement of your subject in frame. I would like to have seen a much lower capture angle, the angle of view is too steep. Agree on the techs. and suggestions made. Looking forward to your next one...:cool:
Thanks all for the advice, exactly what I was hoping for. I ran NN on the entire image due to ISO 800 and based on the NN profile that showed some noise in the bird. Agree that it probably did not need it so used NR only on the BG this time. I reprocessed it, not sure what happened to the original eye but left it alone this time, except for a bit of dodging. I also did not sharpen the image additionally other than the sharpening that is done in BB. Even after I re-sized it the sharpening looked too much. Trying to decide if I should remove the sharpening from BB completely and wait until I re-size the image for any sharpening??? Looks like it may need a tad of sharpening??????
Hi Nick Would not do the sharpening in BB, do your sharpening at final resolution. Some programs can do capture sharpening and selective sharpening to the full image but is is different altogether. The re post looks much better and still would back down the sharpening.
Nick, I have a 40D and never exceed ISO 400, the quality just erodes for me. The repost is much better. Like Al said, do not sharpen until the final phase after the image has been resized for posting.
With Topaz, I often run NR on entire image and am happy with the results. I am not saying that running it separate is not better just giving options.
Practice Mallard
