Well... everything I did can be done in photoshop, but for PP I pretty much always use Nikon's Capture NX. Everything I did can be done in Photoshop, but what I do is quicker/easier in NX, at least for me.
Most of them are just cropped and sharpened with unsharp mask. The tigers are just cropped and sharpnened, with one having the saturation cranked up a bit on (so you can see the difference.)
The only ones I did any work on at all are the keets and the crowned crane.
Capture NX works with Control Points. You can get the same feature by adding the Viveza plugin to Photoshop
Click here for free trial.
I put control points into the front of the keets and brightened them up a bit. I put a control point in the red and cranked the saturation and brightness, and I did the same for the blue and the green. I used some unsharp mask and that was all I did to them. 30 seconds work.
I spent about 2 minutes on the crane. I put a control point in each upper corner and darkened them, I put one in each of the two brightest areas just behind the animal and darkened them as well. I put a control point on the neck and the back (grey) feathers and lightened them and increased the contrast. I put one on the brown feathers at the rear and increased the saturation a bit, and the contrast. I put one on the red on its head and increased saturation and brightness. I put one on the crowning feathers, and cranked the saturation quite a bit and brightened. I then zoomed WAY in on the eye, and lightened it up and switched the color to blue, since these birds have blue eyes.
Then, I ran a selective sharpening over the body of the bird, and was done. About 2 minutes work in NX if you know what you are about.
I also cropped the bird a bit... i like how you had it off center a bit, but I wanted to see a bit more bird and a bit less grass.
Not much I could do with the big guy, so I just left them be.
I am sure that others could do the same exact thing in Photoshop in a similar amount of time, but this is just what I did with my preferred tool.
. I am very new to photoshop. I'm not to the point of working with curves or anything, I am really just using the basic tools and filters right now (clone and unsharp mask). Other than better cropping, what did you do to make these look so good?
![[No title]](/data/xfmg/thumbnail/38/38724-0b9c26c57726c91c6c504310e4428e55.jpg?1734172598)
