Reddish Egret White Morph - Whites Challenge

[Melissa Groo]

Canon 7D
500mm
Gitzo 3530LS full Wimberley
standing in water
1/4000 sec at f/6.3
ISO 400

Guess I'm a sucker for punishment. Here's another highlights challenge, which always scares me (but I like to conquer my fears). I think the highest values were 255. Did some recovery in LR on the RAW. Took it into CS4 and followed Artie's linear burn process as found in his Digital Basics Guide. Also took a tip from Daniel, used Burn Tool on the midtones at 15% or so for a few of the whitest patches. Is this acceptable? Note, I also did pretty substantial Contrast, and some Smart Sharpening, and NR on background.
The Reddish Egret White Morph was my favorite bird on my day out with Shadle on my superb Hooptie Deux trip in Feb. Tampa Bay, FL.
All comments and critiques very much appreciated. Thanks for looking.

[arash_hazeghi]

Hi Melissa,
nice pose but I think the red channel was already clipped and details in the whites is lost, when the channel is clipped burning will not recover any details, you had to lower you exposure in camera to get it right :)

very nice pose

[Melissa Groo]

Thanks Arash. Wish I could go back in time...

[Grace Scalzo]

Melissa, A few thoughts and questions. This looks to have been taken in high bright light. Real tough to create a well exposed image in those conditions, flash can help. I usually quit shooting when the light is harsh. Why f 6.3? When your subject is close to you, you want to stop down some. Legs look soft. Background is real rough looking, something went amiss in Post processing and as Arash said, you're toast if your whites are 255. Histogram checks for blinkies while in the field will alert you to this.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Melissa, Arash and Grace have pretty much covered the main points. Good low perspective, and agree, the BG needs some NR.

[Melissa Groo]

This was late afternoon out with James Shadle on Alafia Banks, we'd just gone back out there after sun began to lower. My memory is that the light was not particularly harsh; perhaps I overdid the contrast in PP.
This was a pretty serious crop, maybe only 30% of full frame. Which could account for the rough background (I'm not liking crops in general on the 7D). I was not terribly close, so probably thought I could get away with f/6.3, as the bird was parallel to me. Most of the time that day though I was at f/8 since the light was so good.
This was my first day using the 7D, and I had recently purchased the 500mm. I have the 580EX but have not started working with it yet, and will keep your suggestion in mind.
Thank you for looking and for your critiques. I knew this image had some issues, but thought it was a neat bird and a neat pose and worth keeping if I could fix it.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Melissa,
Well....looking at your specs you should be OK on the whites......so my guess is you did this with the contrast in PP'ing. You may want to revisit that there.

[Melissa Groo]

Ok, went back in and backed off the contrast quite a bit. Good suggestion, Roman, thanks, I do think it looks quite a bit better.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Loks better now Melissa. Still a few hot spots though.....so try taking down the brightness a bit first.....see if that helps tame the whites even more

[Don Lacy]

(I'm not liking crops in general on the 7D)

HI Melissa, Contrary to what most people think the higher mega pixel count of the 7D does not handle cropping very well I definitely would not crop more then 50% of the frame. This image quality is really suffering in this post from the large crop I would look at redoing the image with a less severe crop and be more aggressive in using the exposure and recovery sliders in ACR even if you have blown the red channel ACR is able to rebuild it if the other two channels have information in them, ideally you do not want any channels clipped especially when using a non 1D body.

[Melissa Groo]

Is this better, Roman? Pulled down the brightness a bit in RAW.

[Melissa Groo]

Thanks Don, that's a good suggestion too, I'll give that a try with a less severe crop. And interesting to hear your thoughts on the 7D cropping (I'm yearning for a 1D body for this among other reasons...).

[arash_hazeghi]

Repost is better Melissa, pulling down the RAW is always better than burning because there is more data in the RAW highlights than there is in the converted JPEG or TIFF. but I agree with Grace that less harsh light is best for these guys. Good points by Don too, I would also avoid making large crops with a camera like 7D, IQ will suffer.

[Grace Scalzo]

Each repost is getting better, Melissa....once you get everything else where you want it, I'd dodge the eye a bit as it is a bit shadowed. Definitely an image worth the work.

[Don Lacy]

Melissa, The 7D is a fine camera and is more then capable of giving excellent results when used within its capabilities and while a 1D body expands those capabilities it is still the skill of the photographer and the choices they make before pressing the shutter that determine the success of an image. Keep pushing yourself to learn the fundamentals of exposure, composition, and post processing which will have a greater effect on improving your images then a more expensive body.

[Mike Milicia]

Hi Melissa,

Repost is way better. Looks like you did not really blow any channels in the RAW data which makes sense since you were shooting 2/3 stop below Sunny 16 which should have been enough to avoid totally blowing anything.

You may already know all of this but, just in case, I thought I'd add a word about using histograms and blinkies to avoid blowing highlights. In a situation like the one here (and in many other bird photography situations), the red channel is likely to be the first channel to be blown. To check for this, be sure to use the RGB histogram which gives a separate histogram for each of Red, Green, and Blue and keep an eye out for spikes (which could be very tiny) on the right side of the Red histogram. The other type of histogram on your camera is the Brightness histogram. This is a single histogram and the graph is typically some shade of white. The Brightness histogram is of very little value in situations like this where the Red channel is likely to blow long before the Green and the Blue. This is because the Brightness histogram is showing you information regarding the distribution of the Luminance (or PERCEIVED brightness) of your pixels. Luminance of a pixel is computed by a formula which weights each of Red, Green, and Blue according to how human vision perceives brightness. The formula is typically something close to : (0.59 x Green + 0.30 x Red + 0.11 x Blue). You will only see a spike on the Brightness histogram if there are pixels whose values cause this formula to exceed a certain threshold. Since Green is so heavily weighted (because human vision is such that the Green component contributes more to perceived brightness than Red or Blue), you can fairly easily blow either Red or Blue or both without causing the luminance to come anywhere near what is needed to cause a spike. For example, the luminance value for pixel with RGB = (255, 102, 156) will only be 153 which is nowhere near the right side of the histogram. But having pixels at these values will clearly show a spike on the Red Channel of the RGB histogram. The bottom line is that if you want to determine if any of the individual channels are blown, use the RGB histogram. The Brightness histogram is fairly useless for this purpose.

Another warning about depending on Blinkies is that they are also based on Luminance and therefore the absence of Blinkies is again no guarantee that you have not blown an individual channel. They tend to work better for whites since if, for example, your Reds are approaching clipping, your Green and Blue values are also quite high and the Luminance will likely be enough to trigger blinkies. But for something like a Red-winged Blackbird, you can blow the Red Channel long before you see any Blinkies and long before the Brightness histogram shows any data anywhere near the right side of the graph. So, with Blinkies, getting lots of them on a part of the image that you care about is almost always a problem but lack of Blinkies does not necessarily mean that all is ok. The bottom line again is that your RGB histogram is the best way to check for blown highlights.

Here are a couple of good articles on histograms :

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...istograms1.htm

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...istograms2.htm

Just be warned that there is a terminology difference between these articles and your camera manual.
He uses "RGB Histogram" for a third type of histogram which I did not even describe above.
He uses the term "Color Histogram" for what I (and your camera manual) call RGB histograms.

Note that the above is based on Canon cameras. I don't know if Nikon is any different or if they use any different terminology.

[Melissa Groo]

Thanks so much for all the thoughts and suggestions, all. It's amazing how much can be learned from a single post here. And yes, Don, important and salient points you make about it being up to the photographer in the end (or rather, in the beginning!).

[Melissa Groo]

Mike, just saw your wonderful explanation of histogram use. I will print this out and bring around with me as I am working on learning exposure. Thank you so much for taking the time to lay this out!

[Steven Kersting]

I think there's still a lot of potential left in this image. I did a quick edit.
I used PS shadows/highlights, blurred the BG a bit (seems a little noisy), levels adjustment and lowered the white output (probably too much), and copied the eye in screen mode to lighten it up a bit.

I'm willing to bet you could do better starting from the original RAW.

[arash_hazeghi]

the last repost does not look like an egret anymore, egrets have white feather not gray.

[Steven Kersting]

the last repost does not look like an egret anymore, egrets have white feather not gray.

I said I lowered the white levels too much....sheesh.

[Aidan Briggs]

Lots of good advice here. It looks like the original exposure was fine but adding contrast in post processing is what blew the whites. If I have an image with some bright whites and I want to add contrast, I usually select the whites, hit select inverse, and then add contrast. That way the whites won't get any brighter.

IMO the second repost looks the best. The last one looks too dark.

Looking forward to more!

[arash_hazeghi]

I said I lowered the white levels too much....sheesh.

I am confused... if you already knew it was too much why did you repost?

[Steven Kersting]

I am confused... if you already knew it was too much why did you repost?

My intent with reposts is not to provide a perfect edit..it's just to give an idea of what might be done... It's not my picture after all.