Female Wood Duck in Watercolor.

[dankearl]

Fall foliage reflection.
1/250
f7.1
iso400
600mm
Flash fill

DSC_2646nx8.jpg

[Morkel Erasmus]

Those are some psychedelic colours, Dan! Not knowing the bird or the area I cannot comment on them...just pleasing to my eyes

[Gary Esman]

Hey Dan, nice peaceful image here. There seems to be a pretty severe color cast, especially on the female head area. Nice lavender reflection. TFS.

Gary.

[Dan Busby]

That's quite a display of colours Dan. The eye has that "steely" appearance from the flash - something that a trip to the eye doctor could fix.

[dankearl]

Thanks for the comments.
Gary, I looked at this again.
i don't know, sometimes I just lose color castes.
I use auto WB and hardly ever change it, but I have had comments lately about the colors.
Particularly in the evening shade here and I did use flash fill.
I reprocessed it and changed the WB to "daylight", it looks warmer but now the Wood duck seems
too brown. I can't tell after I look at them awhile. I sent this to Ofer Levy first, he has kindly offered to look and
give me PP advice. He thought it was too underexposed, so i did lighten it a bit.
Anyway, that is why I like this site, you get honest opinions.
Here is a repost, I did nothing to these photos, but remove some water spots, run NR to smooth the water and
that is it. No color adjusting other than the WB, no saturation at all.
The color is from Burning Bush, which is common here and surrounds this pond.
I also fixed the eye a bit per Dan's suggestion.

DSC_2646wd3.jpg

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

You are lucky to have fall colors like that and I do miss that about living up North. I much prefer the repost as it looks more real and has more warmth. I like the bird there too.

[Mike Milicia]

Love that water! That's a place I would go back to again and again until the color fades.

Repost is lovely except the eye is still a bit funky, most likely from the flash as noted.

[Ofer Levy]

Hi Dan, I am sorry I was not able to process the image as promised. The reason for that is there is no point in trying to get a really nice final image unless you work with the RAW file. When converting the RAW file you can adjust the exposure, change the colour temperature as needed, remove noise etc.
The file you have sent me was an underexposed jpeg which will not give you the desired result.
In any case, you will have to learn the proper basic processing - RAW convertion with dedicated Nikon converter then Photoshop work - in order to get the most out of your good field work. There is no way around this.
Cheers,
Ofer

[dankearl]

Ofer, no problem, I appreciate your opinion and advice.
I guess I do need to go back to the "drawing board" in a lot of ways, I think I have improved my
PP skills, but I have a lot to learn.
Thanks again.