A trumpeter swan flexes its wings as it swims away from the camera.
METhornton_MET1124-Swan.cr2 (29.5 MB)
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Hey Michael, I have looked at this shot many times and considered what I might do differently…and each time I come up with nothing. I like what you did and it works quite nicely in my opinion. I like the crop with the placement of the egret. I like the amount of shore grasses in the background. The only thing I come back to is the dark parts in the water. I might try to raise the shadows in those areas…but other than that, this works quite nicely, sir.
Cheers,
David
Well thank you, David. I always appreciate your critiques. This isn’t one of my favorites, for several reasons. But it’s a nice image to practice on, and I’ve appreciated everybody’s help on cropping (free-style and traditional aspect ratios) as well as processing those really high key areas. I thought it might be fun to share this image with NPN folks, to see how others might do things. Thanks again for giving it your consideration. – Michael
Michael,
Only a little bit late to the party, but thought I would try my hand at this one - As you say, for practice! 
First, what a great capture of the egret with wings unfolded. I especially like the ripples in the water.
Agree with David - not much, if anything to improve on with the b&w. The egret really pops. I also agree the darker/contrast in the water above/left of the bird is slightly heavy, but that’s hardly worth mentioning.
So I thought why not try processing in original color. One thing I started noticing early on is that the blues in the image when exagerated say with saturation, turn blotchy with patches of magenta - like some sort of chromatic abberation - only all over. It’s somewhat noticable (if looking for it) in my final version here. And I’m also going to post a big crop and exagerated blue saturation to reveal the patterns. I have NO idea what this is, and can only speculate that perhaps the higher 5,000 ISO might be contributing. There was a good amount of noise as well.
But alas, the noise was handled quite well using BOTH the new DeNoise feature in ACR, and then on top of that I sent thru Topaz Denoise too.
Oh, and painstakingly cloned out most of the debris, feathers and such on the water surface.
The crop, just enough to get closer, but didn’t want to loose the ripples. My goal was to bring even more emphasis to the egret, so added a pretty strong vignette and also blurred the vegetation up top. Not sure if that helps, but gives more of a shallow dof look.
I did initial processing in ACR with a slight drop in overall exposure, reduced highlights, and tweaked Vibrance, dehaze and of course the Denoise. In PS, added the vignette, another SAT layer, a burn layer for futher work on the vegetation. A general Levels layer to squeeze the end points and boost overall contrast a smidge.
Resize/save for web using TK’s NEW TK9 panel and various tools.
Again, can’t say I could have improved the b&w, so went with the color.
zoomed in patch of water. Not obvious, but you can start to see the magenta patterns in blue. Again, from RAW with only exagerated blue saturation. If you take the saturation slider to the max it of course shows up (now I tested on a blue-sky image of mine and maxing out the blue saturation did what normally happens, the color/sat goes wonky, but not in patches. Weird, I have no explanation.
Hello Lon, please excuse my delayed reply - it’s been busy lately and I haven’t had much time for photography.
Thank you for taking a turn with this photo! I really like your changes, and I think you’ve really improved on my own color version of it.
I’ve gone back to my file in LR and looked for the culprit. My first thought on reading your comment was that I might have screwed up a background mask – but I didn’t create one.
I guess I blundered and pushed the blue, purple, and magenta way off-course: my WB for the image was 5400 with a +27 tint; and my B&W mix shows these colors:
If these settings aren’t responsible, then I’m befuddled like you. I apologize for causing you grief, and I’m very grateful that you spent time helping me with the image. I’ll go back to my RAW file and try to recreate the shot as you did (including running it through both denoise processes), to see if the color problem persists.
Thank you again, Lon. I only took this photo as a serendipitous opportunity to practice a bit more on exposing white feathers in bright sun, but it turned out to be a more engaging shot than I imagined it would be when I was behind the lens. And your color version (regardless of the saturation/magenta problem) is a delightful surprise that I didn’t even anticipate! Best regards – Michael
FYI this is just color noise, if you increase the color noise reduction and crank up the ‘Smoothing’ under this, it will go away. Totally normal at this high of an ISO, you can also run it through the new denoise and this should take care of it as well.
I just had to have some fun with this, the bird is so majestic I wanted to focus all the attention on it.
I achieved this quickly and easily by darkening the entire image, then using a radial filter to bring up the whites on the bird and the exposure a bit. It was all done in camera raw, no Photoshop. Here’s the raw file with adjustments if you want to see what I did.
METhornton_MET1124-Swan-Enhanced-NR.dng (96.0 MB)
G’morning David, thank you for explaining the color noise – I guess I inadvertently created the most blatant textbook example I’ve ever (knowingly) seen. I’ll be on the lookout for that from now on. In fact, I’m going back to my catalog to filter on those high ISO images, to find more examples.
Thanks also for teaching me a new and simpler technique for creating a Low Key image in post-processing. It looks great! I’ll download your image now and take a look.
Gads, I never stop learning from everybody here at NPN – wadda great community!!
p.s. – downloaded and checked out your masks. What an elegant solution!
