Canon 7D; 70-200 f/4 + 1.4xTC at 288mm; 1/80th at f/5.6; ISO 500. Converted from RAW in LR, slight sharpening, NR. Additional sharpening, NR in CS5.
Shot last Friday at about 12:30pm on a heavy overcast, rainy day in my backyard.
At first, I liked the rain streaks. now I think I should have cleaned them out... Thoughts?
All Comments & Critiques welcome!
I like the wet look and clean comp. Beautiful oriole too, and the flowers add a dab of nice colours to the setting. If you have it I would add back some canvas at bottom to prevent the lower flowers from clipping, and there aia bit of a cyan cast on the blacks. A bit more head turn would have been good too, but birds don't always cooperate that way To answer your question, I don't mind the rainy day look, but these particular streaks don't do it fo me.
Thanks for the comments. I will remove the rain streaks.
Dan, I see the cyan now, especially in the tail. I reviewed the raw file and see a hint of it there, too. Can you tell a relative newbie 1. Why the cyan cast is there/how to prevent it and 2. failing to prevent it, where in the process & how you would correct that issue? Initial processing in Lightroom? In Photoshop?
Steve, It's a beautiful bird with excellent colours. The freshness in the image shows up. It's lovely. But I see a few issues:
- The image does not have any embedded ICC profile. So the colours what you saw on your monitor may not be what I am seeing.
- I see a lot of over exposed areas. You can check that by using curves or levels in PS and enable show cliping (in curves) or use the option or alt key(levels) to check it.
Hey Steve, the cyan is likely caused by the heavy overcast/shady conditions...but you've accentuated it by giving the image too much saturation. It is actually more visible on the bill, eyering, upper back, and leg. Hard to tell without seeing the unprocessed raw file but using PS for the repost I pulled back on that, alot, and then completely eliminated the saturation of the cyan channel. Toned down the "hot" shoulder and lightened the iris for a stronger eye. A bit of dodging and burning in some areas. I was too lazy to clone out the rain drops Hope you like, but evidently a better job can be done on a full resolution image...
Ah... such a great place for learning!
Daniel, many thanks for taking the time to explain & demonstrate. Its greatly appreciated! I'm going to have another go at the image from scratch.
Last edited by Steve Wasson; 05-17-2011 at 07:33 PM.
You had the techs right...sharp, and exposure looks good except for a hot patch on the shoulder that may have been enhanced by the saturation (you can also try the recovery slider in LR). Depending on what the converted raw file looks like you may not need to start from scratch. You were just very aggressive on the saturation, very easy to overdo it. The rest is just a few touch-ups that should take just a few minutes at most...
Here's another try: Rain streaks removed; clipped flower on bottom included in crop; overall saturation reduced; cyan cast removed; hot spots toned down...