Eagle on a Wing

[Rick Kibbey]

A Bald Eagle couple built a nest just off a close road. I get out there every day or two to take some pictures. This one was tough with the light on her face and shadows under the wing. With the recent video that Steve put out, I wanted some feedback on the shot and of the shadow recovery which was somewhat difficult. With the sun pretty low, I had an ISO of 800 and 1/2000 shutter speed. I could have dropped the f-stop to 5.6 but wanted to make sure I had some DoF. I got this shot from about 60-80 yds away and had to crop in as she was landing on a branch near the nest.

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[Bardot]

Never easy with that lighting. The blue in the sky suggests to me their should be more detail available. I assume you are working with a RAW image rather than Jpeg

 

[Rick Kibbey]

Never easy with that lighting. The blue in the sky suggests to me their should be more detail available. I assume you are working with a RAW image rather than Jpeg

I could draw out some more detail in the shadows but was afraid it would be too grainy. I'll give it another try with several different approaches. Thanx

 

[Rick Kibbey]

Never easy with that lighting. The blue in the sky suggests to me their should be more detail available. I assume you are working with a RAW image rather than Jpeg

Yes, I'm using RAW but the blue on the web site isn't indicative of what I get on my computer. I can pull out more shadows but it gets grainy fast so I pulled back on a lot of shadow reduction.

 

[Yellowboard]

To address the grain that follows pulling shadows you might want to give Topaz Denoise AI a try. You can download a free copy for a 30 day trial period.
I notice (on my computer) a blue cast to the head, the beak and the feet. You can try to remedy this with a radial filter in LR and then by adjusting the yellow, orange and blue channels in LR. These are all non-destructive edits so you can play with them and not worry about messing up your original file. If you like the post processing you have done so far and you don't want to lose those edits you can create a virtual copy in LR and use that for your editing experiments instead of the original file edits.

 

[Rick Kibbey]

To address the grain that follows pulling shadows you might want to give Topaz Denoise AI a try. You can download a free copy for a 30 day trial period.
I notice (on my computer) a blue cast to the head, the beak and the feet. You can try to remedy this with a radial filter in LR and then by adjusting the yellow, orange and blue channels in LR. These are all non-destructive edits so you can play with them and not worry about messing up your original file. If you like the post processing you have done so far and you don't want to lose those edits you can create a virtual copy in LR and use that for your editing experiments instead of the original file edits.

Great feedback. I’m learning and have a70% grasp but alway willing to learn more. I have Denoise and use it on hard noise but try LR noise reduction first. I’ll give the suggestions a try and see what happens. Thank you.