Magnificent Frigatebird in Flight II

[Harold Davis]

ok, guys. i'm working hard trying to refine my PP work!!! worked hard on this one. four different versions before settling with this one. whattayathink?

D300, 300 f/4 at f/6.3, 1/640s, ISO 640, manual exposure.

comments and critiques greatly appreciated!!

[arash_hazeghi]

can you post the original with no HLS?

[Harold Davis]

when sizing for web and setting it to 200kb it spit out this 100kb file. guess that's as big as it can make it. that's straight out of the camera. no adjustments.

[Alfred Forns]

.. will watch and see what develops .. no pun intended :)

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Hi Harold. I'm glad you posted the un-processed version. I try to be helpful, if I can, but this is very perplexing. All I have is questions.
1) are you shooting jpegs?
2)what image editor are you using?
3)what do you mean it just "spit out 100kb"?
4)is this a large crop?
5)what were the lighting conditions (was the image backlit)?
6)do your images usually show this level of detail before post processing?
regards~Bill

[arash_hazeghi]

Hi Harlod,
your PP is pretty good, looks like this was midday high key exposure and hence the bluish tint on blacks. Here I tried to remove the blue cast while preserving the purity of blacks from what I saw these birds look like. your version is warmer and perhaps more pleasing to the eye, but I think it's a tad overcooked in terms of saturation and warmth given the light condition and subject's color. But I think it's subjective at the same time and I may be wrong, so take your pick. Could not sharpen that much since I was working on small JPEG and will get noisy, starting from RAW would be great!

Forgot to mention great exposure and under the wing details. did very well

[Harold Davis]

thanks arash! looks great!! it was early. checked the exif and it was 5:10 PM so it was one of the first exposures after we got there. and you are right. i did try to warm it up a little for two reasons. one, to get rid of the blue cast in the shadows, and two, to try to fool everyone into thinking it was later.

thanks again for taking the time!!!