White-whiskered Screech Owl-is it believable?

[Marion Anstis]

This is a shot of a White-whiskered Screech Owl. I was using a crop camera, a 500 mm lens + a 1.4 extender shooting hummingbirds in a flower garden when this guy flew up and sat about 20' away. I had no time to change cameras or remove the extender; I switched to portrait mode and shot away. I was able to get the bird in the frame, but little else. In PS I added canvas to both sides (about 2 centimeters), but the background was super busy so the added canvas looked funky. I used the clone tool to attempt to mitigate that. Did it work?View attachment 174

You can see the use of Content Aware (?) fill at left side because of the repeated similar areas (particularly to left), so perhaps touch up one of the repetitions with clone? And also the green streak lower left. Just a thought, and agree with toning down the bright white area at lower right.

 

[Marion Anstis]

Okay, here you go. Of course this is all very subjective

I selected the background in Photoshop ,Inverses selection then

Hue/Saturation - Greens reduced hue by -71 and saturation by -31
Yellows hue -25 and saturation by -2

Then I brought into OnOne Effects , darkened midtowns in background only, did just a bit of blur on the left and right side

I cloned some more of the moss to the bottom.

Basically, I was just trying to neutralize the background and draw attention to your marvelous subject. Just my vision if it had been my shot.

View attachment 250View attachment 250

Much better!