The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Here’s a moment I got of a Lewis’s woodpecker coming in for a landing.
Specific Feedback
Aside from the off colored sky, which I continue to have trouble getting right (it’s saved in sRGB) but it’s gone to purple, not blue, what about the cropping?
Technical Details
Z9, Nikon 200-500 lens, hand held, 1/3200th, f 8.0, 570mm, ISO 1000, cropped to 2116 x 1527
This is a great capture. I love the bird as it prepares for landing. I too shoot with a Z9 and have had the same trouble with purple skies. Have you tried different white balance settings?
Great pose but I see lots of noise in parts of the bird. It looks like a big crop but noise from that camera should be minimal and well-managed, even for underexposed areas. What is your initial workflow?
The sky color could come from the profiles. Have you looked at different ones? Or are you using any sort of filter on the front of the lens? That could also be the culprit.
Or are you using Auto WB in the camera? That could also be the problem. Shoot a gray card in full sun and click on the neutral eyedropper in the WB section and see how much that changes it.
Avery nice pose, Dave, and the focus looks spot on. I wouldn’t think auto WB would be a culprit. I don’t think WB affects the raw file. If it looked good in your file before conversion to jpeg, there has to be something going on at that point. What color space do you use for your processing?
I confess I will shamelessly crop in the name of a pleasing composition. Excuse my ignorance but I’m not sure how to answer about my initial workflow. I have sRGB selected in photoshop. I do have a UV filter on my lens (really just for glass protection). When I treated this photo in photoshop the sky shows nice and blue but by the time it is loaded on NPS it has the purple sky, and a changed up red on the bird. I do not have a gray card but I CAN remove the UV filter. Blue skies look fine in the camera, Lightroom, and Photoshop, just not on NPS. I don’t get it.
I see your problem – I downloaded the file and it is in ProPhoto color space. You need to convert to sRGB to have browsers show the color correctly.
Don’t assign sRGB – that will really change the colors. Convert to sRGB. You shouldn’t have to do that in a separate step – the Export dialog will have a place to specify it.
You say you have sRGB “selected in PS” – where? In the Color Settings?
I tried some stuff in photoshop and it now looks like the right colors. All of this is above my pay grade but I think this is the ticket. I REALLY appreciate all your help.
Much better, Dave. I don’t know how you do your conversion to jpg, but I’ve found the Export function in Lightroom to be excellent and for the most part very intuitive. It lets you set up as many templates as you want for different purposes. I’m on my tablet right now but later this morning I can put up some screenshots of my NPN template.
This is a list of presets for exports. The important ones are the user presets that you create. It is very simple to create them. You just setup an export the way you want it and click on the [Add] button at 1a, then give it a name and click the [save] button.
This is where you enter the destination folder for your exported file. I set up a “to post” folder every year for my NPN images.
If you wish, you can use this part of the menu to rename your photo either with a completely new name or by modifying the existing file name. I don’t bother with it for my NPN images.
This is important. For the web, make sure you select sRGB from the pull down options. I still have a maximum file size of 990KB from the old days of NPN when we were limited to 1 MB and no one has complained about the quality of my files yet. If you want something higher, I wouldn’t go above 3 MB because then the website software will downsize your image and the quality will be degraded.
I select width and height from the pulldown here so it will automatically give me 2048 pixels in the longest direction. The resolution really doesn’t matter as it will automatically be displayed on the web properly no matter what you put there.
I’ve gone with the default settings here and it seems to work fine.
This section is up to you.
You can add your watermark automatically by creating it in this section. The pulldown menu takes you to the watermark creation screen. Within it you can make presets. I usually make a preset for each corner of the image so I can put it in an area that isn’t occupied by anything important.
That’s all there is to it. You just highlight the thumbnail of the file or files (it does multiples) in LR, click the [Export] button on the main LR screen, make any special changes like destination or watermark, and click the [Export] button on the bottom of the menu shown.
You now have sRGB tagged and the colors look good.
@Dennis_Plank’s method is a foolproof way to export JPEGs sized for NPN, and also to add other templates for other uses. It needs 3 simple clicks to export a file from LR – click on the Export button, click on the desired template, click OK. No other interaction needed.
I don’t know if there is an analogous way to do this in ACR or Bridge, which would be the closest possibility for people who use ACR instead of LR for raw development.
If you have LR set up in what I think is the best way – so that a file created in PS comes back into the same folder as the raw file – it is so easy to tweak edits or redo from scratch.
Maybe I’m getting this advice wrong but it seems that you are saying to send photos to NPN straight from Lightroom. I almost always go from Lightroom to Photoshop to sweeten and tweak the image, then resize it and save it as a JPEG then use that file to post to NPN. I never use the straight Lightroom file for NPN. What am I getting wrong? Thanks so much again for your patience.
I usually just save back to Lr after sending an image to Ps from there. I also use ProPhoto colors in both apps and export from Lr using sRGB and other parameters similar to what Dennis illustrated. This way my .psd file is in Lr and I can send it back with all the layers if needed. Hope this doesn’t muddy any waters!
Btw, the bird looks terrific in its new upload. Those colors are amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woodpecker with a mask like this one. A real beaut of a pose, too with that tail!
I liked the original, but the re-post is excellent. Nice colors and detail. Well done.
I export all my files to NPN via PS. If you use: CMD-OPT-SHIFT-W (MAC) or CNTRL-ALT-SHIFT-W (PC), you enter a dialog box that allows you to re-size the photo, should you wish, adjust the size of the file, and convert to sRGB. You can also embed the color profile so others can tell what you are using. Click “Export” and you can re-name the file if you wish and tell the file where to be exported. I’ve found this to be a pretty easy step.
Hi Dave: We’re getting a bit off topic in terms of image critique, but I thought I’d better explain my work flow so you can understand whey I’m exporting from LR. I import all my raw files to LR to get them in the catalog. In LR I’ll do some global adjustments if needed, then I’ll usually ship it to PS for detailed editing. Once I’m finished in PS, I just hit Save in the File menu and it saves it in the same folder the original raw file is in with a “-edit” at the end of the file name. I set it up to save mine as TIFF files, but you can also use Adobe’s DNG file format just as easily. This saves the file with all the layers and PS adjustments intact and you can reopen it in PS using the Edit In command and selecting either Original or Copy (Copy with LR Adjustments flattens the image so you lose the PS layers, but sometimes comes in handy) . Once the PS adjusted image is back in LR, I sometimes make some last minute adjustments (I really like the versatility of the Local Adjustment Brush in LR as you can apply a whole bunch of changes on one brush). When I’m completely finished I then export the JPEG version as I described. This keeps all the versions in the LR catalog where they’re easily retrieved.
You don’t actually send the images to NPN from LR (no one’s come up with that functionality yet), but I put all the jpeg’s in a folder for each year where I can find them quickly when I want to upload them to NPN.
As @Allen_Brooks said, there are ways of doing it from PS that are probably just as good. It all depends on how you like to do things.
For anyone using LR, the method described by @Dennis_Plank is the easiest and most foolproof. One minor correction: you can’t save a file that has been worked up in PS as DNG – that is a raw file alternative format.
And a statement by @Allen_Brooks needs correcting. If/when you export from PS with one of its export dialogs, the profile isn’t embedded so that others can see what you are using. What you are using (i.e. PS’s working space) doesn’t matter for an export. What does matter, and hugely, is that you tell that dialog to convert to sRGB. If your working space is something else, the dialog will convert from that to sRGB so the color appearance is maintained. Yes, you will lose a little color gamut (range) if your working space was Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, but you have no choice. And sRGB needs to be tagged/embedded so browsers know how to display the colors.
In the export dialog box there is a small box to check to embed the color profile. This came up when Keith Bauer didn’t know what profile I was using and checking this box seemed to correct the problem.
I don’t know exactly what was concerning him, but it sounds like he was opening your images in PS and seeing there was no profile (because you hadn’t checked the box) so he was telling you that you should check the box so the profile would be embedded. Then his next step would have been to tell you that you should convert to sRGB for posting anywhere on the web. Do both – convert and tag/embed.
Hi Dave
The cropping is little tight, but still frame is very cool and the feather coloring and detail look good. Is the camera set to sRGB when you’re in the field? Some time conversion from Adobe RGB or a wide gamut can mess up the sRGB look.
Peter
I just checked and I have it set on adobeRGB. I’ve been bouncing around in my settings recently in response to this thread. I just can’t recall where I had it set back when I took this shot. I want to thank everybody for your patient input here with my effort to get blue skies.
