gosling - PS help ?

[allanrube]

Shot this morning - D800 with 600VR and 1.4 tc with extension tube to get closer than minimum focusing distance.
1/250 at 5.6 iso 400

The reason I am putting it here rather than avian is the oof green leaf behind the gosling's head. My PS skills are enough to remove the vertical leaf on the far left, but the "hair" has thrown me for a loop. I can get a lot of the green darker with the quick-mask paint approach, but the last 10% is alluding me.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Allan, these chicks are really cute and always seem to have a blade of grass in their bill! This is a Canada Goose, right? The cloning isn't really that hard, you just have to make your samples from the left and the right so that it doesn't look unnatural. I made a quick cloning pass with the image, just to show you what you can do in a couple of minutes. The image looks really good to me, lots of nice color and light.

[allanrube]

Yes, it is a Canada Goose. Thanks for your re-post, though I must say I was going to leave what you cloned out. It is that bit right to the left of its head I cannot get because I can't make a good selection do to the "hair."

[Dan Brown]

Hi Alan. Here's my attempt, using the quick select tool, I selected the head and part of the back, inverted the selection, clicked "refine edge". With the edge detection tool set at about 18 for this small file, I painted the area where the hairs reside in one stroke. This added the hairs to the mask. I will include a screen shot of the refine edge window in the next pane. After clicking ok, a new layer is produced with the mask. This protects the head and hairs from the clone tool. Then with a clone brush set at about 23% hardness, I cloned the light green out, just barely cloning into the hairs, so as not to create a hard line where the hairs meet the head. Seems to have worked ok

[Dan Brown]

Here's the refine edge window shot with the settings that I used. The mask shown here is not the mask that I produced for the previous pane.

[John Chardine]

Hi Allan- Nice job by Dan. This is a try tough masking job. I don't do this very often but when I do I use Topaz Remask.

By the way Allan- this image has strong yellow/green look very similar to a post by Alan Murphy using the D800 in Avian a while ago. Someone mentioned that this is a feature of the D800. Any ideas?

[John Chardine]

Hi Allan- I played with the image a little and reduced the strength of the yellows using a Curves adjustment in the B channel of LAB colour. BTW I have a calibrated monitor.

[allanrube]

I like your repost John. I am not sure I would have reduced it this much, but it looks better than mine.

[allanrube]

For some reason the reply with quote button is not working for me but this has to do with John wondering about the D800 having a greenish cast. First of all I always seem to have this problem when shooting birds with a lot of green in foreground or background. AS to the 800, many reports I read early spoke about seeing this cast on the LCD monitor. I have had hand surgery soon after getting my 800 so I haven't put it through all its paces yet.
I do use, ACR for processing raw files and the tint automatically is at +8 when I open a raw file.

[John Chardine]

Hi Allan- The tint slider in ACR runs along a magenta-green continuum. The temperature slider runs along a yellow-blue continuum. Is ACR doing anything with the temperature slider?

[allanrube]

Yes it did. That was a big help. I shoot daylight at 5300 but the day was cloudy so I upped the wb to 6000. On this image, however, I got it looking good by reducing wb to 5050. I never would have thought of doing that.

[Kerry Perkins]

Allan, oops! No wonder it was so easy - I did the wrong thing. Dan's the man!