belted Kingfisher

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gordon_g

gordon_g

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I have been having a horrible time doing post later for some reason... NOTHING looks good to me. I need some advise for the nice folks here...
Photo is nothing special but Just a kingfisher sitting on a perch so this SHOULD be an easy quick file to do in POST... Last night I spent hours working on this and ended up tossing it.

So lets hear your thoughts ... First is the photo out of the camera and the 2nd is an attempt that is not horrible but still is lacking IMHO. and for some reason I cant get the blue sky right at all.
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Gordon, he is a sweet little bird! My 2 cents. Bring back a bit of the highlight in the neck. You seem to have some of the contrast in your edit so I would add some contrast. I think the kingfisher looks pretty good out of camera. It just needs a bit of lightening the shadows around the eye and underneath the wing and bringing down the highlights a bit at the neck. The sky out of camera looks good to me. The sky looks a bit pink in the processed photo which I think is adjusted with hue towards the green. I think you could crop the photo more. I suggest taking the current crop and trimming more from the bottom and top left but keeping the bird to the right side.
 
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I think the suggestions and Yezdi's edits above are good. I might try to very carefully dodge the face to bring out a bit more of the facial features. To me that's the most difficult part of an image like this. The dark bird against a fairly bright sky without any fill light on the face is tough. The high shooting angle is tough as well but sometime's that's the hand we're dealt.

Fill flash from a tall flash bracket would have helped tremendously but that can be an awkward rig in the field.
 
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First off, great job even getting a reasonable image image of a belted kingfisher! They are super skittish for me and always know when I look at them...and then they fly off 'laughing'...

I think part of the difficulty with an image like this is that no matter how it is processed, it is still a fairly small bird on a field of blue. Like Kathy G said, I think it could benefit from tighter framing/cropping (which might not be possible depending on the original file size) and moving the bird off center a bit. While subtle levels tweaks can help, in terms of the overall image, portraits on an essentially blank background often benefit from filling the frame more with the subject and allowing the viewer to explore the details of the bird with their eyes. Obviously, sometimes this isn't possible, and then I like to try and show the bird in its environment, or as part of a landscape, or in the midst of some sort of action.

Nevertheless, good find with this one!
 
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@Yezdi Yeah that is much closer to what Im looking for...

@Kathy G I agree on everything but on the crop I'm not 100% sure what you mean by top left?

@DRwyoming yes I agree that would have been a great time for some fill light.

@FHaluska thank you it's my first kingfisher and was really surprised it even see him in Western New York. Thanks for your input was well!!

@ssheipel the main reason why I love this forum... the folks here are wonderful!


Im going to try and make some tweaks to this and see how it comes out.. Thank you everyone!! I will post after to see what everyone thinks!
 
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Gordon
1 HSL works wonderful. Use the slider top left in the HSL layer. You just drag in the blue until it looks. right.
2 NIK Viveza. There you can change the blue to what you want and via the structure slider make it less noisy too. You can add control points to any part of the 'fisher and boots its colour, saturation, anything.
Since I am hours behind, this is just how I put live in dead images. Nice work above.
 
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