I took this photo in melbourne. I especially like this photo very much, the way the bird's wings were spread and all, but I realized that there is something missing in this shot, and I wonder what it is, could you help me out? thanks..[/IMG] I realized that the sky needs some more tone to it but still a beginner as I am, some help will be very appreciated, thank you..
First of all, I'm a complete beginner so this may be horrible advice but... perhaps if you crop the photo so the bird is in the bottom left and the clouds are in the top right, and then darken the clouds somehow to balance out the bird it could be a more interesting image. Definitely get rid of the chimney poking into the frame on the bottom right, though. Maybe even adding a more grain after cropping could add to the effect? Just my $o.oo2.
Crop out the chimney, or whatever that is. Next time try to shoot without a white sky in the background, it's too blown out.
Theres Nothing you can do about the sky but show less of it. I say give it a hard crop, showing the Bird only.
Well, no, you could fix the blown-out white with very meticulous PP. I'd go about it like this: 1. Duplicate the first layer. 2. Select the area to the right with those blue hues, getting as much blue as possible, and apply really extreme gaussian blur to it. Use the eye dropper to get the average colour from that blurred area, and darken and saturate it a bit to account for all that white. 3. Create a new layer, fill it with the colour selected in 2, and add a layer mask. Fill the layer mask with black, then paint white on the mask to start filling in the sky with blue. 4. Futz with everything (blending mode, layer opacity, brush flow and opacity) to get the desired amount of blue, taking care to get a relatively even blue everywhere, but add some obvious differences in the mask's opacity to add some texture. 5. Take special care around the bird, painting and erasing the mask as needed to not paint blue on the bird. 6. Select the bird completely with the tool of choice, or alternately, use the wand on the layer mask (no guarantees; whatever works best). Add some gaussian blur to the layer mask get a more naturally blending tones in the sky. The most time consuming thing to do is the painting of that layer mask. If you're willing to do the PP work though, overexpose the sky and concentrate on exposing the bird correctly. It's perfectly acceptable practise to over-expose the sky in this case, particularly when you aren't someone like Scott Bourne with 800mm lenses and fresnel lens thingamajigs strapped to your nuke 'em flash so you can throw light just as far.
Wow, sounds tricky, I'll go and do some PP works of the photo then, haha.. thanks for going through all that troubles of typing the instructions though, that surely would be a very useful one
Well, it was more to illustrate the point that something can be done to salvage the sky. I'm glad you found it useful. It's something that only gets easier with time and practise with the tools (like PS or GIMP)...and a nice Wacom tablet (I say that only because I have extreme affection for mine bordering on passionately loving an inanimate object).
