Egret in early morning

[tamelvis]

[FrankMi]

Nice composition Elvis, but it could use some post processing to bring out the details. I'd try merging layer copies adjusted for greater brightness back into the original. If you'd like, I could try some adjustments in ACR and Photoshop for you later this evening.

[tamelvis]

Hi Frank,
Tks for the comment. Love to learn from your tuned result and related technique

[FrankMi]

Hi Frank,
Tks for the comment. Love to learn from your tuned result and related technique

Hi Elvis, I opened the image in Adobe Camera Raw and saw blown highlights and shadows. I increased the Recovery to 50 to address the highlights but increasing the Fill Light to maximum still left blown shadows, mostly at the top of the image so I set the Fill Light to 50 as well then opened the image is Photoshop CS5.

I set the capture sharpening to 300% at 0.3 pixels. Made a Compressor Tonemapped copy of the image and blended about 10-15% back into the original to pick up some subtle color in the Egret.

Cloned out the rock to the left of the Egret. Cropped to avoid most of the ice? and blown shadows in the river.

Selected and sharpened just the Egret. Set the Unsharp Mask to 40% and 4 pixels, then 40% at 2 pixels.

There may be others with far better post processing skills than I have that could do better than this but it should give you an idea as to what can be done.

[joewatt]

OMG, Frank! Maybe it could be better, but what you did is amazing to me!

[tamelvis]

Hi Frank,
Tks for the effort to stimulate a different perspective. Here's a re-try. Love to learn more

[FrankMi]

Nice! You're getting there! Keep up the great work!

Perhaps you are ready to try a little cloning? If so, lets clone out the rock under the Egret's right wing. For starters, take a look at this video:

http://video.about.com/graphicssoft/...-in-photos.htm

When you are ready, give it a try using the examples from the video! Have fun Elvis!

[tamelvis]

Tks for the information ... Sorry for (very) late response. Have been using Capture NX2 which has similar features.

[Bobobird]

Excellent image to start with and made much better by the edits.

Frank - what is a Compressor Tonemapped ?

[FrankMi]

Frank - what is a Compressor Tonemapped ?

Photomatix Pro has a number of presets in addition to creating your own presets and simply using the multitude of control sliders available for the tonemapping processing. The basic built-in presets are Enhancer - Default, Compressor - Default, Enhancer - Painterly, Enhancer - Smooth, Enhancer - B&W, and Compressor - Deep. There are other presets and any presets can be customezed by andusting the control sliders.

I usually start with checking the built-in and my personal presets to find one that works best with the particular image and I 'may' customize the result using the sliders.

I have since obtained a copy of Topaz Bundle and I now use the Topaz Adjust for this purpose if I'm not working with an image that requires HDR processing.

In almost all cases, I blend only some of the result back into the original image to avoid 'overcooking' the image. Hope this helps!