What technical feedback would you like if any? Open to any suggestions.
What artistic feedback would you like if any? Too busy? Too much background adding noise? This was cropped to 8.5x11 format.
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If backgrounds have been removed, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
Nikon D500 Nikon 200-500mm
Shot at 1/200 sec F8.0 240mm and EV -1.3
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Ej.jewett
You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.
You caught a great pose in the Tri-color, EJ. I do think you could stand to crop it a bit tighter, particularly on the right which would serve to decenter the heron a bit. There appears to be a blue/green color cast to the image, though that may have been just light reflecting off foliage, but it still looks a bit odd. Detail in the bird looks fine and I also like the reflection.
This is a very typical heron hunting pose and perhaps one of my favorite pose. The intensity is just very appealing. From the image design perspective, I think the habitat is rather too busy for me and with the highlights all over the distant land, itâs rather distracting. I would definitely clone out that bright OOF land in the foreground right in the middle though.
In terms of processing, Dennis has addressed the color cast but I think there is something funky going on with the image quality especially when you look at the full size of it. The sharpness is not there and the fine feather detail on the body of the bird is completely mushed out. Perhaps if you describe your processing, we can give more suggestions on how to improve it.
Thank you Dennis.
I have always cropped the images very tight, but is has been recommended that I let the background also be part of the story. In this case, the bright dry ground area in the back almost parallels the shape of the heronâs back. I thought I would use this as a sympathy tool⌠but it apparently does not work as clearly as I had thought.
The estuary is very green overhead, and everything has a green caste to it. I have tried removing a bit of the âgreenâ but the method I tried in LR (Color - adjusting caste and illumination) did not work for me.
Adhika,
Appreciate your feedback. As I told @Dennis_Plank, I am trying to add more background instead of close crops. I am not yet comfortable with removing larger distractors - working on smaller items now like branches, etc.
I seem to be having a problem posting to NPN site. In the first 2 photos I posted, the photos seemed to work out OK, but now I seem to be losing fidelity between what I see and what is postedâŚ
I have recently changed to using Topaz Studio 2 to remove noise but it creates adjusted files in TIF format. Since these are too large to post, I export them (via LR) to JPG and limit size to 6 mb. Maybe I misread the instructions on this site, but I thought it was recommended to limit the file to this size.
I will re-read the instructions to see if there is an alternate method of posting my photos.
EJ, in the LR export module, try this: Resize the image to say 1920 px in the long edge, quality 70, Sharpen for âScreenâ, amount âStandardâ. I hardly get a file that is more than 1.5~2MB with this setting.
