Wow! That is an exquisite BIF image! Great pose, HA, detail, and real subtle soft BG is superb. The sun highlights in front put it over the top for me. Very nicely done!
Hi Matthew - Looking good - Like the pose and the slight head turn towards you.
BG sets the bird off nicely - only thing I might do and it could just be because of the web resizing ... Can just see the faintest of catchlights in the eye - might try some additional sharpening on the eye to see if you can just give it a little bit of a lift - will make a big difference.
Thanks everyone for looking and for the comments.
You are right, Lance, that there is a very slight catchlight. It's not much more noticeable in the full res version, but I will work on it a little and see if I can pull it out some more.
Lovely image, Matthew. I do wish the head and eye had been in the brighter area instead of in the shadow but you did an amazing job on catching him in flight with an interesting angle and a good HA. Nicely done!
There is a catchlight in the eye though it is very dim. Other than creating a catchlight in PP (which I don't really want to do) I'm not really sure how to bring it out.
Matthew, the easiest way to do it is using a curves adjustment. I use the quick selection tool to grab the dark eye and then open a curves layer. The curves grid is divided into a 4x4 grid...go to the top most right intersecting point and grab the straight line there and pull it up and to the left a bit. You'll see some of the whiter areas start to come out. Then go down to the bottom left intersecting point and pull up and to the left there as well (Now the curve is almost a half circle above the once straight line) and that will pull up the darker areas of the eye.
This doesn't work every single time but it does more times than not and those two intersecting points are almost always where the light and dark tones of the eye lay within the grid. Hope that helps!
Yes, that helps a lot Jules. Thank you so much. I can notice the difference immediately in your repost.
I was playing around with the exposure and brightness in ACR and just couldn't seem to get an acceptable result.
Willet In Flight
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