Beauty & The Beast!

[Ken Roberts]

Canon EOS 7D; 100-400mm L IS f/4.5 - 5.6, focal length: 170mm, f/5.6, 1/1000, ISO 1000, AF Point Expansion.

Watching over a hundred of them early morning a few weeks ago, I saw beauty in the beast...

[Ken Roberts]

I like most of this shot, but was disappointed with the sky, so blown out. Is there a way to fix this? Please comment any other aspects needing correction too!

Thanks,
Ken

[Randy Stout]

Ken:

Nice dorsal view of the vulture, but agree with your comment on the sky.

There are a number of ways to try and help the sky. I ran a multiply layer on a selection of the sky, which did provide a little more color and detail, still not impressive.

You could reconvert the raw file, reducing the exposure significantly to bring in more color and detail in the sky, then combine the original conversion with this, painting the sky from the darker conversion into the posted image.

You could even do a pseudo HDR conversion to see if you could recover more from the sky.

In order to get good detail like you showed in the vulture, the lighter areas are going to be sacrificed, it is just a question of how hard you want to work on trying to bring them back.

Cheers

Randy

[Arthur Morris]

I love TVs and you did a good job of focusing against the BKGR but for me the cluttered BKGR with the vertical lines is a much bigger problem than the sky.... EXP reasonably good also.

[Ken Roberts]

Ken:

Nice dorsal view of the vulture, but agree with your comment on the sky.

There are a number of ways to try and help the sky. I ran a multiply layer on a selection of the sky, which did provide a little more color and detail, still not impressive.

You could reconvert the raw file, reducing the exposure significantly to bring in more color and detail in the sky, then combine the original conversion with this, painting the sky from the darker conversion into the posted image.

You could even do a pseudo HDR conversion to see if you could recover more from the sky.

In order to get good detail like you showed in the vulture, the lighter areas are going to be sacrificed, it is just a question of how hard you want to work on trying to bring them back.

Cheers

Randy

I'm sure those are great suggestions Randy. Sadly, although I have PSE 9, I haven't used it much, thought I should probably grab LR3 too. I only use dpp right now, so I haven't learned how to do a lot of PP yet. That's another part of my learning curve...

I'm working on it though! Thanks for the thoughts and the great suggestions!

[Ken Roberts]

I love TVs and you did a good job of focusing against the BKGR but for me the cluttered BKGR with the vertical lines is a much bigger problem than the sky.... EXP reasonably good also.

Thanks Artie, I couldn't agree more. Something besides the sky had been bothering me with this shot too. You nailed it, the vertical lines from those couple of trees really distract the eye. I think the reflection of them adds to the destraction as well, although at first I thought the reflection was pretty cool. Removing those trees in PP and the part of the reflection that is the trees may be beneficial. Unfortunately, It won't be likely worth the effort knowing I can't do to much with the BG yet... I'll have to give due dilegence to learning LR3 and PSE 9.

Thanks again for your instructions both of you.

Ken

[Arthur Morris]

YAW. For now it would be best to simply work at creating more and better images rather than trying to make fair images into very good images... JI =JO :)

[Art Kornienko]

As mentioned, the bg and I don't think the crop works for me.