Rework:
B&W:
Original:
Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Great Egret (Ardea alba)
A recent early morning opportunity…
Background dark because of the brightly lit bird against shadow.
Any comments appreciated.
600mmm. 1/640 sec @ f/8, ISO 320
Wonderful detail. Looks a little greenish, at least on my monitor.
Yes, wonderful catch!! The light has a slight greenish cast here, when I would expect more reddish for early morning. I think it could be corrected with the slightest tweak. Here’s a guesstimate, reducing greens and blue in the highlights and adding red – done with the upper right corner of a Curves dialog. Not perfect but gets the idea across. Better done in raw. I love the blues in the shadows and boosted them back up with the LL corner of the Blue channel in the curves.
@Ronald_Murphy and @Diane_Miller thanks for your input and suggestions. At the end I decided to go a different route to deal with the color cast, posted above.
Regards.
David
I like the black and white treatment as it brings out the feather detail nicely. Nice pose and good eye contact. How about a combination of the two, where the eye and beak are in color?
The B/W works! And I like @Allen_Brooks’ idea! My version went too pink. It’s hard to match the color of gorgeous early light.
Very beautiful composition, David. My personal preference would be to work it for the proper early morning color. To me the B&W loses something in this one. It’s too sweet a moment for the cooler tones of B&W.
Hey great to see you David. Hope you’ve been having a grand time out and about. LOVE the texture and pose. So bendy and floofy. I know dealing with color isn’t easy for you, so I took a stab.
All I did was bring it into Adobe Camera Raw and used the eyedropper to select the brightest white bit and hit auto - it came up with what looks to be a good white balance to my eye. Then I ran a Lights 2 mask in TK9 and put the layer into a multiply blend mode and set the opacity at about 50%.
I love the drama in this - that black background is so right, this bird is putting on a show. Thought about adding some warmth back in, but decided I like it like this. Of course it’s all subjective.
Thanks @Kris_Smith, like your version. I reworked the color one and posted it above. Hopefully the color works.
Regards,
David
Thanks for the comments, @Allen_Brooks and @Diane_Miller here’s your suggestion. Kinda fun to work it that way:
Hi David. Lots of fun option for this one. I do like your color rework the best, though the mixed B&W and color is certainly interesting.
Hi David, really nice preening pose with good DOF. I like the repost at the top of this thread. Good rendition of whites and color to my eye.
Yeah – the rework works!!
I usually have the best result with early/late color with Daylight WB, then maybe some lowering of saturation. That could be variable with different raw converter’s various color profiles.
HI Diane, thanks for the note. I appreciate it. I have a set of white balance presets from 4900 to 5500 with the tint slider set to 0. The hope was that I would not have to deal with any color cast issues. The first image I posted was at 5400 tint 0. The final image using an WB picker (eye dropper) on the bird was 5121 and tint 7.1 towards magenta to counteract the green cast. So clearly even with a daylight WB I can run into some cast issues. Funny because in the past most color film was set for daylight WB and you couldn’t do anything about the slides or prints before photoshop. Anyway, I will go back to using the WB Picker and dropping some RGB color readouts on the image before posting. Hopefully that will help.
Thanks again for your help.
Cheers,
David
