Siskin
Managed to find some hungry Siskins, just landed from a flight from europe.
Tried to find an area in the tree for a decent background. All critiques welcome.
D300 + sigma 500 4.5
Ap priority
iso 800 (light was grim!)
F6.3 @ 1/80 +0.5ev (find this lens has a massive quality increase at 6.3)
Split frequency technique used to bring feather detail out and seperate pass used to increase detail and contrast in the eye.
kind regards.
Stu.
Last edited by Stuart Hill; 10-11-2010 at 03:02 PM.
Great head angle, sharpness, exposure and background. For me the bird and cones are a bit overpowering, and I wonder if it would be possible from the original to do a vertical crop, with the bird on the left, the cones in the center, and more canvas/ background all around. I also find the whites around the bird's belly a bit distracting, but I would love to know from you or others in this ETL forum how they could be improved.
Richard
Hi Stuart - Lots to like here - Good HA - Sharp - Good detail - clear clean sharp eye and good background - food in the beak/action is also very nice. Sharp were it needs to be.
For my personal tastes the crop is a little tight - bird is a little large in the frame. The whites on the belly do not bother me too much assume they are present on the bird - possibly they could be toned down a little - see the educational resources forum - for article on saving the whites - Linear Burn layer.
You are correct with stopping the sigma 500 down a little does improve - though its useable wide open also.
Hey, Stuart...a lot to like about this one. The only part I really don't care for is the OOF tail - it feels a little disjointed from the rest of his body at this angle. That said, I did a little clean up on him to show you the difference in getting the small details right.
Here's what I did:
Recropped the image so his eye was in the ROT's position.
Cloned out the white feathers that were out of place. Toned down the white feathers that were a bit hot. (I did this by using the eyedropper tool to grab a soft white off his belly and then painting over the hot white areas with the soft brush tool set to 20-30% opacity.)
I gave his eye a slight curves tweak to make it pop even more than it already did. I
cloned out a few of the pieces of branch that was cut off by the line of the frame. (Always try to get a natural break along frame lines in camera if you can. If not, look for ways to remove partially included leaves and stems if at all possible. It makes the viewer's eye stay within the frame a bit longer this way.)
Lastly, I did a bit of beak clean up, leaving a piece of food but taking away the smaller ones that were covering up the lines of his beak.
Little tiny changes - they can make a big difference! See what you think...
Thanks for the help guys. Can't believe how much it helps having a fresh pair of eye look over an image.
Julie, love your repost. Definately the way to go. Looks simpler and hence cleaner viewing. Only thing I personally prefer is leaving the seed on the beak as he was feeding.
Thanks again.
Stu.
Hi Stuart- I have to say that the sharpness of this image where it counts trumps any "issue" I might see with the image. Sharpness is superb, and this is what I consider an "easy" sharpness. Your image is not sharp because of any post-processing you did. I can tell that the original was sharp to begin with. Doing this seems not to be easy judging from many images I see posted on the internet. The body shape of the bird with the round belly and the silly little tail sticking out of the bottom is interesting and shows how the split second captured by a still camera sometimes misrepresents. I am reminded of making images of people while they are talking. The usual outcome is some strange contortion! For me I only wish that the alder cones were in focus- all of them. A smaller aperture would have helped with this and the focus depth of the bird.
Hi Stuart, Love the sharpness, soft light, BG and comp! A question regarding your split freq tech, how did you perform the seperate passes? I have been playing with the SF and also lab L sharpening and haven't really caught on to the technique of selectively applying (nr on bg, sharpen bird, sharpen birds eye more....). I guess this should be handled in a seperate thread, or PM me. Thanks for any help!Originally Posted by Stuart Hill
Dan- this is as good a place as any to discuss. Stuart can explain "split frequency" but for selective NR and sharpening I use Quickmask. q gets you in and b for Brush. Choose 100 hardness. Paint the mask over the bird. Touch up with the eraser (e). Q gets you out. Background will be selected. Save the selection Select->Save selection. Run NR on background early on in processing. Complete processing. Resize image if needed. Load BG selection, invert shift-control/command-i, sharpen subject.
Thanks for the critiques. At the moment, there is a thread open which is getting very interesting regarding SF. Its in workflow forum, called USM is redunant.
Once you've read that thread things will become a bit clearer. Basically I use a few actions for speed. The first pass concentrating on fine detail. A second pass increasing contrast for the eye detail, highlights etc. Then using the colour information channel I run a noise reduction on a copy. Using masks where needed.
So for instance a show through mask for the fine detail on in focus areas of the bird. A show through mask for the eye. And a hide mask, masking the bird on the copy background. what you should be left with is a silky background but still with some texture from the SF texture layer and a very sharp bird. running NR on a normal background would remove this texture. So you may have texture in leaves or the bird but none in the background which may or may not bother you. Just seems a bit more natural for the texture to match.
This all sounds so labour intensive and complicated but the above image took less than 15mins with actions. Have a quick look in the workflow forum, thread-Split frequency cont'd. Retouch potential is quite cool.
Must mention. This way all changes are temporary until you flatten the file. So you can go back or edit each stage of the operation at any time.
Once again, thanks for the input and replies.
regards.
Stu.
Last edited by Stuart Hill; 10-13-2010 at 02:41 PM.
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