Backyard excursions

[ryanwaff]

A couple of days ago, I was wondering around my garden when I happened upon this Spotted Thick-Knee, who I posted a photo about last year. They vanished for a long time, but appear to have returned now. Please C&C as you see fit

 

[matthewo]

I like it, nice good ground level shot.

other then that, I think you should back off the sharping a bit, it looks over sharpened a good deal, but I think the image will still look very sharp even if you don't sharpen it this much, the focus look to be spot on.
as well bring down the highlights a touch in the feather on the breast is a little hot, was this shot with a Nikon camera? with my Nikon I see blues in the whites when I shoot raw and I pull the blue channel down on most of my photos, I can see slight blue in the highlight whites on the breast. but that could also have resulted from the over sharpening so its hard to know without seeing the original

if it was me I would crop so the birds eye is in the top right hand corner, IE, loose a lot of the right side of the photo, but I like the ground as well as some padding above the bird.

 

[matthewo]

hope you don't mind, but here is what I kind of ment edit wise.

because you put such a large resolution photo on here I was able to tone down the noise when I downsized it for a much smaller resolution.

 

[ryanwaff]

Thank you for the advice, Matthewo!

It was shot with a nikon, yes. (D90). Its interesting, Ive never noticed that blue before. Now that you have pointed it out, I can clearly see it Thank you! As for the sharpening, I did very minimal amounts of sharpening to the image, but it was the unsharp mask in photoshop, which I have found gives less than perfect results...

Again, thanks for the advice and rendition

 

[matthewo]

I have had pretty good results with the regular sharpen in photoshop. Then if i want it less i will just fade last action.

If you tweak un sharpen mask to setting that work well then i guess you could make it work better, but i have been pretty happy just using regular sharpen. I do use a tiny bit of topaz clean sometimes as well as a bit of selective noise reduction if the image is high iso. Also sometimes i will use the sharpen wand/tool to slightly increase sharpness on the eye or face if needed

Yeah im not sure why blue is so pronounced on nikons raw, i dont know if jpg takes care of it a little better in camera processing. Its not just wrong white balance, i shot a bridal session for a friend and i had to pull out blues very far, even after correcting white balance. As the dress just looked very blue, it also shows up in blacks giving them a more blue look. My editing monitor is a bit more contrasty and saturated then an iPhone or regular old laptop so i see it more i think.

 

[coastalconn]

Ryan, nice shot, Matt nice edit. I've always noticed the Nikon Blue and have always tried to fix it with WB. I might have to take a stab at lowering blues a bit in the future...

 

[matthewo]

I drove myself crazy messing with wb trying to get it to go away. Then the whites turned too yellow or the image was way too warm. I then pulled down the blue channel in camera raw saturation, seems as the saturation one works best, not luminance. Then i said that was easy lol. It helps a lot, just be careful on sky photos and photos with a lot of blue as you will loose saturation. But sky and nikon cameras has always been a pain in editing for me. If i want to recover highlights or shadows and change too much the sky blue really becomes hard to get right. IMO it ls really easy to make it look atomic blue

 

[SashaT]

Interesting observation on the blues, I too recently had an issue with it on some of the photos I took of my kids. They had white shirts on that looked blue when I opened the files in lightroom. I too tried messing with the WB but too much yelow in the shirts and eyes were the result. I'll have to try the the saturation thing.


OP: Cool looking bird, I don't think I have ever seen one of those before.