These birds appeared quite suddenly and I didn’t have any time to prepare for the shot. It was a matter of point and hope.
The result is far from perfect but i’ve worked on it to get it to this stage. I’ve adjusted a strong colour cast and I’m happy with the composition after I cloned out a couple of birds at the back, but the main bird isn’t as sharp as I would like it.
Overall though my main concern is that the birds have a lot of burned out white on their wings and backs, (you can tell that it was a low strong sun). I’m beginning to think that I won’t be able to retrieve any more detail from these areas. So far I’ve only managed to introduce some grey!
But if anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.
Specific Feedback Requested
How can I get more detail into the burned out white areas on the birds.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Lumix GX8 Leica 100-400mm @ 100mm
Doubt I have much to add to what you’ve already tried. It is a neat image with all those pelicans coming at you. I like the reflections. Where was this taken and what’s the animal in the background?
Have you tried working from a linear profile to begin with? Tony Kuyper makes them for various cameras and you can load it right into Lightroom. If the highlights aren’t completely blown, it’s remarkable at recovering detail.
If all of the brights are indeed gone and you don’t like grey, you could paint a color sampled from some other part of the bird onto the blown-out areas through a luminosity mask. Don’t want to lose such a good photo.
Wonderful catch! Blown whites are so frustrating, and sometimes even a linear profile and a high dynamic range sensor can’t recover them.
If it were mine, I’d reduce the dark areas at the top edge, tonally or by cropping. They pull my eye away from the very interesting flight formation and wonderful reflections.
Thanks for the helpful comments. I’m now in touch with Tony and he is creating a linear profile for my camera. It will be very interesting to see if it can help.
I will post a new version incorporating the changes when I can.
Meanwhile thanks for the cropping suggestion Diane, I think that it works well.
