Showing off & RP


I took this yesterday in the late morning on a very foggy and cold day. This red tail decided to park on a post and just sat there waiting for me to do whatever I was doing. He seemed to be totally oblivious to my presence or was just telling me take that picture and drive away and let others have some time with me.

What technical feedback would you like if any? It looks a little bit to read to me which seems to have occurred during the JPEG conversion. The TIF is much browner. Despite making an attempted decrease the orange luminosity, it still not what I would like.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

Pertinent technical details or techniques: iso-900, 500 mm PF, no extender, F8, 1600th D 500, handheld and full frame, minimal processing,

(If backgrounds have been removed, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)

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Wonderful detail and tonalities! S(he) does look a bit on the reddish side, but the whites look well balanced. No luck with Selective Color or Hue-Sat?

Nice detailed portrait. Background works really well. I noted your comment about it appearing too red. Don’t know what process you use to convert from your master files to sRGB jpegs, but color shifts shouldn’t happen.

I took this image into PS, did a couple of color correction techniques and came up with this version. I don’t know if this is more like your original or not.

Beautiful detail and background, David. I suspect Keith’s version is closer to reality given the lighting we had. I’m thinking your color temperature was a bit warm in the raw conversion, which can do that, but it still shouldn’t change from the tiff to jpeg conversion that much.

What a beauty, David. So glad s(he) was so willing to pose for you. I was perfectly happy with the colors until I saw Keith’s fix. I think that probably is closer to the correct color. The details though, in the feathers, in the face of the hawk, are really nice. That smooth BG calls all attention back to this magnificent subject. Great shot! :+1: :+1:

This is gorgeous. Beautiful detail and background.

Excellent portrait of this hawk. Really well exposed and a ton a detail. I especially like the dof.

Thanks for doing this. I think the color looks a little more realistic with respect to the reddish tint but to me on my monitor, you picked up some blue color cast and some of the white plumage below the chest. I’ve been using DxO photo lab version 4 which uses the Adobe RGB color space. I have yet to find a way to adjust that and change it to sRGB. And I don’t know if that would make a difference. I do like the noise reduction engine in this product quite a bit and I like the HSL control. I may just need to learn how to deal with the color conversion issues that I sense occur from TIF to JPEG.


I use the TK sharpening action to convert to jpeg. As far as I can tell, everything is set to sRGB in the TK action. There is definitely some warmth increase with certain colors. This is a repost with white balance set to daylight at 5200K. I think it is an improvement over my original. But your brown plumage is better.

Now, this is what I call a raptor portrait. Intense look and beautifully detailed. Well done, Hans ps I like the repost even better !

I think the original is more accurate color wise if this was taken at Ridgefield…

This is a very interesting findings; that you find the first image to be more accurate. I typically look at my iPad to check our balance and almost all the time, the color balance of images on the iPad relate more closely to the Tiff image than the image on my main monitor after conversion to JPEG.

This is a great portrait of the hawk. I’m a bit partial to the warmer tones in the original(particularly as if affects the eye); also, I like the more saturated background in the original.