Red Bellied Woodpecker

[Joel Eade]

Backyard setup shot
1D4
500mm f/4L + 1.4 TCII
Tripod
Manual exposure
Evaluative metering
Center AF point manually selected, rear focus
ISO 2000
f/7.1
1/500

Brightened the eye and di some minor clean up on the bill.

[Cathy McEntee]

Beautiful image Joel--sharp, excellent detail. Love it.

[John Chardine]

Nice female Joel. One of my fav. WPs. I don't mind that the virtual tail is cropped, the image is really a head and shoulders portrait. I would have left some room above the top of the tree stump. I would ease back a little on the sharpening a little. Could you lay out your sharpening workflow.

[Joel Eade]

Nice female Joel. One of my fav. WPs. I don't mind that the virtual tail is cropped, the image is really a head and shoulders portrait. I would have left some room above the top of the tree stump. I would ease back a little on the sharpening a little. Could you lay out your sharpening workflow.

Thanks John, I did toy with crop in terms of leaving some at the top but then I went with trying to center the eye by the rule of thirds. I also agree that this one is a little too "crispy". As you know sharpening for the web is sometimes tricky as it seems often some sharpness is lost during the process of posting the image.

Sharpening is generally the last thing I would do to an image but getting there is important too...I generally only keep images that are pretty good out of the camera to begin with.

I shoot RAW and convert to 16 bit tiff with ACR and although I do no sharpening per se sometimes I bump the clarity slider to the right as much as +25-30.

I use the basic conversion recipe from Artie's Digital Basics (well worth investment for any newbies to photoshop)

Adjusting levels and selective color adjustments really helps with revealing detail as well.

When I am done with the basics I save a file full size as a tiff, then I perform sharpening.

I have been using Topaz In-Focus selectively only on the bird (not the background) and usually only move the sharpening slider maybe 1/8 of the way to the right at most and usually the micro-contrast slider just a minimal amount as well.

Then I resize the image for the forum using the image size function in CS5.

If it loses some sharpness I then use USM at 500% 0.2 pixels 5 threshhold, I might even make two passes with these settings.

That's a quick summary of what I have been doing. Thanks for the comments.

[nancy hazen]

Joel, I always enjoy your images. I love the bright eye. I'd like to hear more about what you said.
I use the basic conversion recipe from Artie's Digital Basics (well worth investment for any newbies to photoshop)
Thanks
Nancy

[Joel Eade]

Joel, I always enjoy your images. I love the bright eye. I'd like to hear more about what you said.
I use the basic conversion recipe from Artie's Digital Basics (well worth investment for any newbies to photoshop)
Thanks
Nancy

Thanks Nancy, for the kind words.

Artie sells a PDF file called Digital Basics in which he outlines in a step-wise fashion how he uses ACR to convert his RAW images and also his basic Photoshop workflow.

You can purchase it from his web site on-line store. Since it is his original work and he is selling it I don't think it would be kosher for me to publish anything directly from it here.

I would say that for me it was very worthwhile and a good amount of information for the money. Especially if you are just beginning to use Photoshop.

[nancy hazen]

Thank you Joel. I am going to check it out. Artie has done so much good work and has help so many people freely, I would never want to ask for a copy. I am pretty familiar with Photoshop, but would benefit from new ideas. Thanks
Nancy

[John Chardine]

Thanks John, I did toy with crop in terms of leaving some at the top but then I went with trying to center the eye by the rule of thirds. I also agree that this one is a little too "crispy". As you know sharpening for the web is sometimes tricky as it seems often some sharpness is lost during the process of posting the image.

Sharpening is generally the last thing I would do to an image but getting there is important too...I generally only keep images that are pretty good out of the camera to begin with.

I shoot RAW and convert to 16 bit tiff with ACR and although I do no sharpening per se sometimes I bump the clarity slider to the right as much as +25-30.

I use the basic conversion recipe from Artie's Digital Basics (well worth investment for any newbies to photoshop)

Adjusting levels and selective color adjustments really helps with revealing detail as well.

When I am done with the basics I save a file full size as a tiff, then I perform sharpening.

I have been using Topaz In-Focus selectively only on the bird (not the background) and usually only move the sharpening slider maybe 1/8 of the way to the right at most and usually the micro-contrast slider just a minimal amount as well.

Then I resize the image for the forum using the image size function in CS5.

If it loses some sharpness I then use USM at 500% 0.2 pixels 5 threshhold, I might even make two passes with these settings.

That's a quick summary of what I have been doing. Thanks for the comments.

Thanks for your sharpening methods Joel. A few points I'll make:

- you may be doing some capture sharpening in ACR unless you change the default settings. The Clarity slider changes mid-tone contrast which is a kind of large-scale sharpening.
- I see you sharpen the large image before resampling. This is a technique advocated by Roger Clark in this thread: http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...read.php/18534, particularly when you have to sharpen different parts of the image different amounts.
- after resizing, you apply one or two passes of USM. I tried the settings you give and although the Threshold is quite high (5), one round is pretty aggressive. In fact I found one round of your USM settings perfectly adequate for a sharp image which has never been sharpened except for some mild capture sharpening in ACR.
- so you could be sharpening your images in different ways 4-5 times over the course of processing, and this is on "images that are pretty good out of the camera to begin with". This amount of sharpening to me sounds excessive and may be responsible for the "crispiness" of some of your images.

For fun I would try running a little bit of capture sharpening in ACR (values 10, 1, 20, with adequate masking), then no more sharpening until after you resize for web, and then try one round of your USM settings, or try 75-100%, 0.3-0.4, 0. If you want to give Smart sharpen a try, I use Remove Lens Blur and usually set it for 75-100%, 0.3-0.4, depending on the image. BTW, if you set Smart sharpen to remove Gaussian Blur it is apparently the same as running USM.

[Joel Eade]

Thanks for the excellent tips John, will definitely give them a try!

[EzhilSuresh]

Joel, nice image. Thanks for sharing your post processing steps as well.