Excellent close-up of the Savannah, Allen. It’s actually a little overpowering in the larger view. Since you have it so large in the frame, I can notice just a tiny bit of selection issue along the lower back and at the tip of the tail where the background picked up the adjustment you made to the sparrow. I don’t know how you process, but I like to put the bird on a separate layer, then if I run into this issue I can just go to that layer use a small soft eraser brush to eliminate the parts of the background that got picked up in the selection. You can do similar things to masks, just a matter of taste in processing as far as I can tell.
Hi Allen
I like the great big in your face Sparrow on an evergreen. I did take a second look at the post in the larger frame and could see Dennis was looking at. Anyway very nice photograph.
Peter
Very nice – good detail and DOF in a pleasing setting! A straight-on look can sometimes look a little odd to me, but you pulled it off here. Not sure what you did to the BG, but the glitch Dennis spotted will be easy to fix. The greens might do with a bit more saturation, but they do work well with the quiet colors of the rest of the BG. You wouldn’t want to overpower the bird.
Thanks, Dennis. I’m not sure what you mean by a separate layer. You seem to differentiate this from using a mask, which is how I approach processing. How do you go about using a separate layer without a mask? Thanks for your help.
Hi Allen: Make a selection and with the selection active type [ctrl-C] for copy and [ctrl-V] for paste and it will paste your selection into a new layer in PS above the current layer. Your selection will be on a transparent background and you can then make any alterations to it you want to without affecting the base layer.
But if you cut and paste something then you can’t correct any flaws in the selection – which you always see too late. (And masking tools are still far from perfect.) Instead if you just hit the mask icon (which it sounds like you’re doing) you have the same equivalent but you can easily add to or subtract from the selection with small brushes when you see problems. If needed you can do this on a new layer so you can still clone on a layer underneath if needed.
Nice catch of this sparrow Allen. Post processing aside, I like the bird on the needly perch with the pleasing BG. Loosening up the crop would be something to try I think. I like the head on look.
