Originally Posted by
Julie Kenward
Seyed, Pat is right...this is a beautiful reflection! I think you have a good start to this one but I want to give you a few additional thoughts to see if you might want to incorporate some of them into this image.
First off, your exposure feels a little dark to me - especially that upper right corner (URC) area but there's a fair amount of noise throughout the image so my guess is you could have bumped that exposure up a bit. You do have a slight spike on your histogram on the white (right) end but that's just the white patch on his one feather as far as I can tell so not a big worry there.)
You've got some chromatic abberation going on on the reflection side of the bird. (The dark blue area that outlines the bird's body). You can try to fix this in Camera Raw or you can zoom in, pick the blue color of the water and trace around that area with a soft brush and "paint" right over it. That is what I did here.
Also, the blue of the water was a little off so I opened the hue/saturation panel and slid both the cyan and the blues to the right just a bit under the "hue" slider.
I ran noise reduction next to help soften/blur the noise in the BG.
Finally, I think your crop is a little bit tight on both top and bottom. I personally would have cropped this to a vertical but you've gone horizontal so I added a little canvas to the bottom and then recropped to an 8x10 size putting both birds near the ROT's horizontal lines and moving the bird out of center, leaving more area in the direction that his body is turned.
Let me know if you have any questions. You've got a very nice image here...it just needs a few small tweaks!
Hawfinch
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