A very interesting photo. The water is very striking, quick silver look. Bird is sharp and well exposed.
The foot just on the surface of the water adds interest.
Wish the head was turned our way just a sliver more.
I have a couple things to look at on this one when I get home, but I really like it!
I do like this. Just wish for a touch more of a head turn bring the head at least parallel to the image sensor. Over which areas did you run NR? Also over the rocks and water around the birds feet?
Hi Rich this image has me intrigued also. I like the soft almost velvet quality my first thought was perhaps a lot of NR applied? I too would like to see the unprocessed image if you don't mind.
Rich here is a quick rework I colour corrected using Average Blur, did a bit of quick patching & cloning. Made two layers, applied Noise reduction to the Background and just a little sharpening to the Background copy, then i made a Layer Mask to Hide all and brushed out the bird and foreground. I wonder if you possibly applied noise reduction at a later stage or when you made a mask perhaps you didn't invert it - so that the Noise reduction was actually on the bird and it's legs??
If you go back to the RAW I am sure you will make a much better job than the one I did.
Richard, I like your subject and its foot skimming the water surface. Sharp too. I also wish it wasn't walking away, or at least had its head turned to parallel to the sensor. Like the others I found that the subject looked to be smoothed out by NR. Your original shows that you may have run it on the plumage too to rid the colour noise. Check to see if your NR software has a "colour noise" option to run on the plumage and rocks as this won't affect details like "luminance noise".
I like the photo too but, as Jonathan suggested, I think that, at some point in the process, more widespread noise reduction was inadvertently applied. To my admittedly untrained eyes, Jonathan's repost shows a better balance between fine detail and noise reduction.
Yes I like it - much better from a noise and sharpness point of view.............. not too sure about the colours, the tips of the wing feathers appear to be orange in colour??
just a smidgen too much saturation lowered a little
My book says wing feathers are bordered by bright buff so a little too much was likely to go orange
there is certainly no cast .There is orange in their genes lol as sometimes, apparently , the "ruff" can be orange:)
Last edited by Richard Unsworth; 01-18-2011 at 05:52 PM.