Cattle egret

[Tim Rucci]

Cattle egret 1/250, at f8, ISO 400 with 100-400L and 1.4x extender on MkIIN, hand-held.
From last season at the alligator farm rookery - not by best shot but the the coloration was nice on the bird.

[Jim Neiger]

Hi Tim,

You captured a bird with some nice breeding plumage, but the image appears a bit strange to me. The bg looks kind of mottled and pixelated and the feather details I would expect in the bird seem to be lacking. Please describe your post processing and crop amount.

[Manos Papadomanolakis]

Agree with Jim!

[Tim Rucci]

Hi Tim,

You captured a bird with some nice breeding plumage, but the image appears a bit strange to me. The bg looks kind of mottled and pixelated and the feather details I would expect in the bird seem to be lacking. Please describe your post processing and crop amount.

Thanks guys. The cropped image you see was originally a 2621 x 1747 pixels, so it is a little more than 2/3 of the oginal shot. The image was about a stop underexposed, or maybe a little more. I made shadow/highlight adjustment to bring out the darker areas and then dodged a little around the eye, which was still too dark for my taste. Then increased contrast slightly attempting to make up for the flatness caused by shadow/highlight adjustment. Downsized and sharpened slightly with 2 passes of usm at low setting (probably 130/.2/0). Nothing was applied to the background that wasn't applied to the entire image. The background in the original is smooth, with only light noise, but due to the light color I didn't mess with it. Maybe the image was too dark to salvage. I was still shooting JPG at that time (shame on me) but nothing but raw for over a year now. I realize now that this photo is actually from 2 seasons ago.

[Jim Neiger]

Thanks guys. The cropped image you see was originally a 2621 x 1747 pixels, so it is a little more than 2/3 of the oginal shot. The image was about a stop underexposed, or maybe a little more. I made shadow/highlight adjustment to bring out the darker areas and then dodged a little around the eye, which was still too dark for my taste. Then increased contrast slightly attempting to make up for the flatness caused by shadow/highlight adjustment. Downsized and sharpened slightly with 2 passes of usm at low setting (probably 130/.2/0). Nothing was applied to the background that wasn't applied to the entire image. The background in the original is smooth, with only light noise, but due to the light color I didn't mess with it. Maybe the image was too dark to salvage. I was still shooting JPG at that time (shame on me) but nothing but raw for over a year now. I realize now that this photo is actually from 2 seasons ago.

Tim, Please repost the image in a reply in this thread after conversion with no other modifications. I'll take a shot at processing it and then explain what I did.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great breeding plumage and I look forward to Jim's repost.

[Tim Rucci]

Tim, Please repost the image in a reply in this thread after conversion with no other modifications. I'll take a shot at processing it and then explain what I did.

Ok, here's the cropped but unedited one... Ouch! I hate for any of you folks to even see this. I should have trashed it...

[Bob Pelkey]

Where's your effort, Jim?