REDucation 2

[Arthur Morris]

Artie I would crop just a litle bit on the top and right of the frame but keeping the feeling of empty space around the bird. The pose of the bird with "flaps" raised reminds to me an aircraft ready to take land. You know that I am a big fan of toning down BG in images like this one.... ;-) By the way, some whites in the red channel are on the 255 level

Thanks on all counts Juan. I cropped as suggested for the repost but have several questions.

#1: I am unsure of what you mean when you wrote, "You know that I am a big fan of toning down BG in images like this one.... " Are you saying that you like that in this image or that this image needs the BKGR toned down. I think the former but wanted to clarify.

#2: Please explain how I check the whites in the red channel. The optimized TIFF showed no overexposed highlights but I must be missing something...

thanks again on all counts.

[Juan Aragonés]

[quote=Arthur Morris;204481]

#1: I am unsure of what you mean when you wrote, "You know that I am a big fan of toning down BG in images like this one.... " Are you saying that you like that in this image or that this image needs the BKGR toned down. I think the former but wanted to clarify.
quote]

#1 What I mean is that, instead of the fact that the sky is OK in terms of exposure, I think that a slightly darker sky would improve the result and the reason is very simple: images with a high contrast and/or a high saturation are very attractive for the human brain (and for the avian brain too due to common biological reasons related to vision). If you want to increase the contrast of an image, and made it more attractive for the viewer, you just need to enhace the differences between dark and bright areas in the image. The spoonie is very bright and if you tone down the sky then the contrast would increase. Of course, toning down the Bg is an alteration of the original Bg but during many years photographers have been using fifferent sistems to do excatly the same (using filters, working on the development of the negatives, etc).
In the attached file it is possible to see the effect of toning down a part of the image. The spoonie is untouched but the contrast it is clearly different in the four versions (I prefer the second version from the top)

[Juan Aragonés]

#2: Please explain how I check the whites in the red channel. The optimized TIFF showed no overexposed highlights but I must be missing something...

There is an area that is very bright in the spoonbill but very few pixels are on the 255 level and they are located on the red channel. You can check that by several ways. In example, select the eyedroper tool ang the info panel and if you place the eyedroper on different areas of the image you will see the levels of each pixel on each channel. Or you can go to the levels adjustment panel and select the histogram for each one of the three channels. As you can see, the histogram of the red channel show some pixels in the 255 level.

Being honest, I think that the number of hot pixels in the red channel is almost unnoticeable and doesn´t affect the overal image quality. Anyhow, this is a good oportunity to explain how I test if I have this problem in my images and to learn how other members do the same. :)

[Juan Aragonés]

#2: Please explain how I check the whites in the red channel. The optimized TIFF showed no overexposed highlights but I must be missing something...

Here is the second attachment