House Finch feeding time

Image Critiques Avian Critiques
1

HF-feed-1-j.jpg
HF-feed-1-j.jpg6352×3840 2.34 MB

HF--Feeding-2-j.jpg
HF--Feeding-2-j.jpg3196×2148 1.12 MB

Critique Style Requested: Standard

The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.

Description

I am very fortunate to have a lot of small birds come to my feeding area for family time. these two house finches are enjoying a feast. one of These birds are certainly going to get their share.

Specific Feedback

any

Technical Details

Both of these images are taken at iso 5000, 400 mm +1.4 X, 5000th, f10

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1 Like
2

I really like your subjects, perch and BG, but something in your processing is letting you down. In the second there are artifacts in the LL quadrant and in the far UR. In the first, it looks like you blurred the BG but the mask wasn’t good enough. (It never will be for a hard-edged subject without painting on better details with an editable mask in PS.)

I don’t remember what processing software you use, but if you have plain old LR/ACR and PS, I would expect the raw file with minimal adjustments will give a good result. Most things labeled AI are still much more artificial than intelligent.

1 Like
3

Nice captures - especially like the poses and colors. The BG blips Diane mentions can easily be smoothed with a Generative fill in PS, if you use that

4

repost with improved background second image See below

HF--Feeding-2a-j
HF--Feeding-2a-j6392×4296 2.6 MB

I open my files in light room classic, then move them over to DxO Photo labs 7.7 and do some minor adjustments. That sends the file back light room classic where further adjustments are made and then is sent to Photoshop 2024 beta latest version.
In this case I selected focus area and inverted it where I applied minor Gaussian blur generated by Photoshop. I think it looks better.
What do you folks do?

1 Like
5

This is much better, although the selection is a bit hard-edged. I don’t know what you did before, but since you have LR and PS, I would question what DXO is doing for you. It is sending a rasterized file back to LR (no longer a raw file) – and the adjustments in LR, if you are doing anything more than cropping, are meant for raw files.

I would suggest first using the LR Develop module (get it as right as you can, but don’t overdo contrast or saturation) then go to PS, where cloning and filters can like Topaz and Nik can be used, and editable masking and layers adjustments can be done. Save it, and then it goes back to LR for organizing and exporting. LR is getting more sophisticated but PS is still the gorilla in the room.

In all but the smallest cases, you don’t want to fix glitches after the fact. You go back and re-work to avoid them, as you did here.

6

Nice job on the repost of the second image, David. Blurring backgrounds is always a bit of a nightmare to get it to look right. If I’m trying to do it, I’ll usually do an extremely careful selection so things don’t bleed where I don’t want them to . Your technique here looks like it worked very well. Maybe feather the selection a few pixels to get a slightly smoother transition, but it looks very good as posted.

7

Much better! Love the poses here