Description: Blue jay was digging in the snow looking for something to eat. I wish that I had my off camera flash with me to perk up the lighting.
Specific Feedback Requested: I would like to put a little more contrast in the scene, but with a dark morning–this is fairly close to what I saw. I may need to drop trhe exposure by a third of a stop. Let me knoiw what you think. Thank you.
Pertinent technical details or techniques: D500 200-400mm f4 (1/500 sec at f6.3, ISO 560, lens set at 360mm) Levels, Brightness & Contrast, DeNoise AI Luminosity Mask on Midtones with Curves adjustment, crop for comp.
Is this a composite?
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Excellent detail, Jim. The exposure looks fine to me as-is. I’m not sure about more contrast-I’d hate to see the shadowy areas of the background any darker. You could brush a tad more contrast onto the Jay with the local adjustment brush in LR-I often brush some last minute adjustments on to the bird before I’m satisfied with my processing.
A really good looking bird in a very nice setting. I might bring the top left corner in a bit to take some off the left side and top. I like the perch. For me it seems a bit dark so I would bring it up a bit esp. the jay. The jay seems to get lost a bit in the grey shadows.
A lovely scene well captured! I like the balance of the bird and the snowy perch. Maybe a bit of Saturation or Vibrance would work, but I think the softness of the scene works well.
An issue I see is that there are areas where too much sharpening shows. When I do Denoise, I like to turn off its sharpening and do it on a separate layer with Topaz Sharpen AI. The three methods there give very different results, and I don’t know how the sharpening in Denoise works. Areas that are oversharp from the Denoise step can always be masked off on its layer and sharpening and other processing can proceed on a composite layer.
What a great scene. I love that perch and, of course, the snow. I like the comp. as well. Very nice. My first thought that was a bit of contrast could help. See what you think of the below. I just selected the bird and ran a slight curves adjustment.
This is a superb image. Maybe it really isn’t sharpening but just frozen plumage. In any case if you think it is too sharp, you can always just do a slight 5% blur over the areas that are affected. Just another way to do it. In any case I like the pose, the perch, and the contrast between the foreground and background.
