I was struggling with getting the exposure right this morning and this guy may not be salvageable. took this about 8am. I wish I could have had more DOF and less ISO, but this is what I got.
he looks reasonably sharp in the original file - I tried John's suggestion of smart sharpen, first before downsizing - and it still didn't look very sharp, so then I tried William's suggestion of using it after downsizing for web and I think it is better.
anyway - this guy had a clipped wingtip on the left, so it seemed like nice practice to play with extending the canvas and fixing the feather. LR didn't show any blinkies, but I pushed recovery far to the right anyway - the body still looks hot. ended up exporting 2 copies of the picture to CS5, one with recovery at 100%, one with it at 0 - and copying the wings of the no recovery version as a new layer over the 100% recovery --- otherwise they were distinctly brownish.
cloned out a dirty feather on his side. cropped a little off the right for composition. ran NR on background, and smart sharpen on the egret in CS5. all told, probably more fixits than is appropriate.
thought the colors of the background and the wings were nice - would like to hear what folk think.
7d, ef400mm f/4 DO 1/1600 sec at f/5, iso 800, manual
Pat I would save this. You did a great job in CS. Obviously it would be nice to see some more details in that hot white area and maybe some of the Photoshop experts here can bring some of them back. I would move the bird as close to lower right corner as possible (give her little more room to direction to where she is flying) and I would also do couple of rounds of NR to BG to make it little more blurrier. Not that the BG is too distracting now either but NR would probably make for example the green color behind the bird little less obvious.
I like the diagonal pose of the bird, under wings look good. The hot looking whites on the body need some recovery and the shadow on the lower wing near the body could be lightened some. I agree with NR on the BG and more room on the left.
Best wishes for the New Year
Peter
First, make a duplicate layer (Ctrl + J) and then change the blend mode to Linear Burn. (There's a tutorial about using Linear burn on hot whites in the educational /tutorial section written by Artie Morris if I remember correctly.) Lower the blend mode to about 60-65% looking just at the body area and stopping when they look close. (I found 61% was about right.) Now add a layer mask and pick the soft brush with the FG color set to black. Now "erase" everything but the body area so the original colors come back everywhere else.
There were still a few hot spots so I then made another layer (Ctrl + Alt + E) and used the eye dropper tool to grab the off white color of the body area that wasn't hot. That loads the color into the FG square and you grab that soft brush again with the opacity set to 20% and paint over the areas that are still hot.
It did a pretty nice job!
My only other problem with this image is the strong blue cast over the top of the wings. I tried a few different things but really couldn't get them to go more neutral so maybe someone else knows a few tricks for those?
Julie - thank you so much for your very clear explanation of the linear burn --- I had gone thru Artie's tutorial and written notes down, but somehow I skipped the adding layer mask and using the soft brush to erase unwanted part - and i couldn't get it to look right so I discarded it.
I've replaced my jumbled notes on it with your clear one, and redid the photo and the body feels much better now! thank you again!
yeah, the blue cast along the upper edge bothers me too - and the noise is especially heavy in it. So will play some more with that and with trying to randomize the background a bit more per Mikko's suggestion, and see what happens.
thanks guys - I really appreciate all your help ---
save or toss?
