Giving me the evil eye

jsecordphoto · Apr 12, 2015

Earlier this week in the dunes on the coast of northern Massachusetts. This is the same Project SnowStorm owl that I posted recently, which as far as I know is still around the area as of today. I always find these photos tricky to process, because the owls can be so hard to expose correctly.

I ended up
-duplicating the background layer
-adding a layer mask
-using the color select tool to select only the owl
-inverting the layer mask

then went and using the levels adjustments brought up the brights quite a bit in the rest of the scene without clipping the highlights in the owl. Maybe this is something I should've figured out a while ago, but it really helped evening out the scene.

tirediron · Apr 12, 2015

Looks good!

pgriz · Apr 12, 2015

You're making it look (relatively) easy. Which usually means that you know what you're doing. Nice image. I've never seen a snowy up close.

jsecordphoto · Apr 12, 2015

Thanks, I appreciate that. We had such a dismal winter here in New England I didn't shoot much other than these (and other) owls, which gave me plenty of time to work on learning more post processing techniques. Becoming more proficient with processing helped a lot when out shooting too, as far as knowing exactly how to shoot and expose scenes to make them easier to process after.