a portrait of a male blue-and-white flycatcher with an artificial green background, created especially for small formats such as the iPhone. I'm posting a less-artificial shot here, plus, in the post just below this one, the photo exactly as it came off my camera.
For the shot above, I extended the canvas 10% to the right, 5% on top, and 5% on the bottom. I cloned away some twigs. Following Tony Whitehead's critique in the thread linked to above, I first did my normal sharpening, then select-sharpened around the head.
Thanks for posting the original. I like that there is a bit of texture in the BG and prefer it this way. I might desaturate a few points and put the bird a bit more to the right in the frame as it is a bit centered as presented.
Ditto Axel's comments. I also prefer this composition than the tight crop from before. A bit of a pale halo surrounding the tail, but that's an easy fix. Well done on the branch removals. Nice glance-back pose!!
Craig thanks for posting the original. You were right, the BG is really very saturated, it looks very prominent and, in my opinion, some toning down of the saturation will prroduce a more pleasant result. What puzzles me is that the BG seems to have a lot of yellow compared to the bird (the histogram of the green channel is placed at the right) :confused: I do not know your settings for the D300 but I remember that when I began to use my D300 in vivid mode, the results were great in the monitor of the camera but they looked way oversaturated and unnatural at the computer. Now I use a neutral setting and my results are way better and more natural (and I have to say that I am a big fan of saturated colors;))
Regarding composition I agree with Axel
Thanks again for taking the time to post the original :)
Thanks, Juan. I'm going to set my D300 to neutral mode for a while and see what happens. I took the shot by the way in a "forest" containing only a single species of tree (locust).