Post your best bird shots!

[ddt0725]

Nice photos everyone!

Denise

[Oren]

Hey ddt0725, this is a nice bird, but the picture is **VERY** soft.


Honestly, do you think it should be posted on the "post your best..."?

[Bill W]

cormorant

[ddt0725]

Hey ddt0725, this is a nice bird, but the picture is **VERY** soft.


Honestly, do you think it should be posted on the "post your best..."?
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Sorry, I deleted it.

Denise

[Joel Eade]

Thanks Bill, here is my general way of working which applies to the female cardinal image as well.


I shoot RAW images and sort through looking for the ones with the best composition, exposure and sharpness. I convert the RAW images using ACR to apply some initial slight adjustments to exposure,clarity and sharpening.Then in photoshop I usually adjust levels and curves first if needed. If there are any small distracting elements in the frame I may clone them out. I generally create a duplicate layer to either reduce noise or add gaussian blur to the background. Very last thing I do is to sharpen the bird using unsharp mask. The sharpening can be tricky and is easy to overdo, the amount and technique is somewhat dependent on what the final output will be. Example: sharpening for small web based images is different from sharpening for print. There are many ways to sharpen an image but I use unsharp mask most of the time. When I'm finished I usually save my master file as a 16 bit tiff and don't sharpen it much at all so I can apply the proper sharpening later depending on what I'm doing with the image.


If you want some in depth info about sharpening this is a good read : http://ronbigelow.com/articles/sharpen1/sharpen1.htm


One particular issue with Cardinals is that the camera seems to natrually oversaturate the red channel sometimes and you can bringback more detail if you selectively desaturate the reds a little, each image is different so apply this trick as needed.


Photoshop can only do so much, I think what is most important (and not all that easy) to learn is proper exposure. I'm still not great at it on a consistent basis.I definitely want to avoid images thatare underexposed....you can't restore adequate detail to these in photoshop most of the time. If you nail the exposure and focus correctly your work in post processing is not too difficult and the image will really pop.


Joel

[Joel Eade]

Brendan,


I think this is a good one....see if you can work with levels to brighten it a bit then desaturate the reds a little and finally sharpen it a bit more....I beleive you can bring out some more detail.


Joel

[Bill W]

Joel;


Thanks for the reply; our process for PP is relatively similar. Though the cormorant I posted doesn't indicate this....I just like theaction capture of it's dive.


The reason I asked is she looks to be quite contrasty (is this a word?)and the colors on my monitor (Eizo 21") don't look natural....was she molting? She looks almost like an HDR, whereas your males look quite normal, i.e. colors, clarity, detail.


The cardinals are a staple at my feeding station and one of my favorite subjects....thanks again Joel.

[Joel Eade]

Bill,


Maybe it's a bit oversaturated or the hue isn't quite right, also the bird was wet due to the rain which made it look different but it wasn't intentional on my part and it wasn't an HDR image. It was spring time last year, I don't know if the bird was molting or not. I was trying to make it look like it did when I snapped the shot.


Thanks,


Joel

[Oren]

NOTE: this is a **100%** crop! sharpness was set to 4 in DPP, no extra PP was done.

[Fast Glass]

He he, finally getting your feet wet aren't you...[Y]


Good shot,


John.