Early in the morning I found two of the 3 males in this coalition patrolling the boundaries of their territory.
This is the smallest, and ugliest, male of the 3, but he was trying hard to pose well. The other 2 males have bigger manes, one nice and dark, but he wasn't posing very well, the other long and blond (but he is collared, bloody researchers! ), and he wasn't there anyway. He was having a heavy breakfast of buffalo steak with his 7 ladies and 7 kiddos.
I tried to sharpen with the action of Philip Perold, as posted by Morkel Erasmus, but ran into a slight problem. When intersecting no pixels would be selected, resulting in no new channel to be created. I 'solved' it by deleting the intersecting. So please pay special attention to the sharpening, I've been struggling a bit with it lately.
Photo taken in South Luangwa National Park, Zambia.
Canon 7D
ISO 400
Canon 100-400mm at 250mm f7.1
1/500 sec.
Hi Egil
Nice looking lion, like the pose with the upturned paw, raised ears and good colour and catchlight in the eyes. Techs look good, and the sharpening looks okay to me. The light looks quite beautiful, although removing some of the strong orange/red colour might help separate the lion a bit more from the background, as right now both the lion and BG are similar in tone.
Good work here
cheers
Grant
Lovely light and nice catchlight. It's amazing how that upturned paw adds interest plus it makes him look so relaxed. Sharpening looks pretty good to me. I think Grant has a point about toning the BG down just a tad to give the lion more pop so that he stands out.
Lovely male in sweet light, Egil. I also like the angle you had here.
Following our PM discussion and your comments regarding the way the action stopped short of working for you, I decided to try it myself. I could obviously only work on your image as posted here.
I normally resize all my BPN images to 1000px, mostly because my personal portfolio website also utilises images at that resolution and I hate doing double work . I have customised Philip's actions to resize to 1000px as opposed to 1024px, but that is the only change I personally made to the action.
I ran the action for 1000px and it worked fine. It also brought out a lot of fine fur detail. As posted here, it may be a tad 'too' sharp but I wanted to show you it works.
I also reduced some red/yellow saturation and added some midtone contrast which also added some 'pop'. Would love your thoughts?
I like it, I guess no way other around to seperate it from the background than to mask it manually, but a good suggestion!
Post it on another forum too, no comment about the paw...but I think it's what makes this image interesting!