Well done Maureen! Great wing angle and feeling of action. I like the composition. I wish the head, or the whole body were turned slightly more towards you. I'm viewing the image on my Macbook monitor, which is calibrated but I don't trust it for critical looks. However, I wonder if the image would benefit from a bit of brightening?
Maureen, I did a few small tweaks to your stunning image...
Opened a levels adjustment layer and moved the white slider to 235 and the midtone slider to 1.11. This brightened up the darker areas a bit more.
I ran a round of noise reduction and then masked out the body of the bird so it was only on the BG.
I sharpened the head and neck area a bit as they are slightly further away from the camera's focal plane than the body is.
I used filter/distort/lens distort and moved the image horizontally so it appears to be more even with the HA. Sometimes it helps - sometimes it doesn't. Your call here.
Beautiful positioning and lovely crop. I especially like the position of the feet and toes here.
Greetings. Wow, what great color and feather detail. I'm less inclined to brighten the top end very much... I do agree with some selective brightening of the midtones, & nr on the bg. A beautiful image.
Jules, I like the overall tone of the repost. The shoulder is a little too hot for my taste & I think the midtone lift with levels decreased the contrast in the wing feathers a bit too much... a selective curves adjustment might have worked better to preserve the contrast.
Maureen - I really like the wing position and comp that you've captured here. I agree that the bg needs NR. As to the amount of brightness, I'll leave that to you and the experts.
Thank you for the comments. I'll try brightening it up a bit and run some NR on the BG.
And Jules, thanks so much for taking the time to show me what could be done. The filter/distort/lens distort is new to me, so I'll have to take a look at that.
Cattle Egret in Flight
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