Another snail kite in flight image from the three days of great image-making with some nice guys: Tom Grey and Ray Halt,and Jim Neiger on Lake Toho.
Handheld Mark III with 500 lens.
Great image. I like the wing position and no deep shadows on the bird. The grass BG is fantastic. The nit-picky things on the bird's position is the tail is not well seen and the beak intersects with wing's edge. Those are small issues. You should rightly be very happy with this image.
Now tell me this is a RAW. The grasses are severely blown in the red channel - a problem in early morning light. If the RAW file has red channel clipping, use ACR to do the conversion and use the "Recovery" slider to tone the red channel down and then if still overexposed, us the "Exposure" slider to get it the rest of the way. Don't forget to hold down the ALT key to get the screen to show the clipping and adjust the sliders to eliminate. Overall the image is a bit bright.
hi susan, love your girl snail kite. they are beautiful!! congrats on the shot. i was thinking just add a little contrast, but robert's the expert! great info there.
I am grateful to this forum for pointing out things I should have recognized myself. I did what Robert suggested, plus lowered the exposure slightly, and did a little curves adjustment for more contrast. Is this an improvement?
The repost looks good. You can increase inherent contrast w/o using curves by doing a Local Contrast Enhancement using USM at A=20 R=30 to 60 T=0. Vary amount and radius, even threshold to get the right look. The idea behind this is not to edge sharpen it (hence the big radius) but to increase contrast by broadly sharpening it to a lessor amount over a larger radius. If you do it on a BG copy, you can use opacity to control the affect. For some better explanation go to the following: