Oh Deer

[jacsul]

Shot this the other day, feel free to comment.

[Colin Southern]

Hi Jack,

Just wondering what post-processing you've applied to it?

I'm assuming that it was shot as a JPEG, and not in RAW? Uncropped?

[jacsul]

I downloaded a trial version of CS4 and just played around with it.
Yes it was shot in JPEG and cropped a little.

[Davey]

when you say "shot this" you do mean with your camera right?

Might just be me but I find the grass behind of a similar shade not idealistic. Any chance of changing the hue to more yellows if possible and perhaps a slight shift in the deer saturation or hue toward the red/orange just to separate them more. If you agree of course, might just be the way it is on my monitor or my eyes (I blame it on my impending old age, but that's another story).

[Dave Humphries]

with PP in the kitchen?

[Lincs1]

Where are the feet?

Not quite on the subject.

Lincs1

[Geoff F]

Where are the feet? When an animal looks that good you don't eat it all in one go!

But seriously, I wonder if this is, once again, just another crop issue. By holding a piece of paper on the screen to block out the distracting foliage above the deer's head it looks a lot better to me.

[Dave Humphries]

Yes, seriously now.

Having the feet in shot would obviously be better, however, I suspect that by the time you were ready for a second shot, it was rapidly retreating!

Geoff's suggestion works for me.

Other things I noticed;
May be a touch over saturated?
Chromatic abberation is present; look at opposite sides of legs and especially tree trunks - I think it's all 'one sided' across the shot, so guess this is a crop from one side of a quite wide angle original - I may be wrong.
Background is sharper than the deer - possibly blur the background in PS4 to reverse the effect?

Hope that helps,

[jacsul]

I'm new at this, soo, let's see who can do a better job enhancing this image?

EDIT AT WILL....

Jack

[Yan Zhang]

Without much experience, I guess shoot wildlife would be usually quite difficult. I agree that the picture would look better if the feet were there. But the deer face was nicely captured.

[Davey]

I forgot to sharpen it again after I softened a little to reduce noise sorry. It's a bit of a quick 'n' dirty edit and probably not to everyones taste but I find changing the grass colour makes the deer stand out more. Ideally if I was thinking (it's very late here and I'm about to crash) I would have feathered the mask more and blended the edges to get rid of the superimposed look of the deer.

If you want to know what I've done basically I just selectively change the saturation of different areas (with HSL adjustment layer and mask), softened/v gentle blur noise, hue shifted the grass into yellows and desat to make it match the (presumed) dry grass to the far right background and tweaked the curves (very gentle s shape to make up for loss of contrast due to desaturating a lot). Don't worry if you're new to it, you'll pick it up in no time. I used to be useless but gradually getting better over time (although I have very little experience of photo manipulation still it's getting easier). In fact it's sometimes easier knowing less since stuff I'm used to doing is not something you'd do when working on photos, just getting comfortable and familiar and best way to do that is trial and error and most of all enjoy yourself doing it. Hope this helps Dave.

[jacsul]

Very nicely gone, practice makes perfect.
I time I'll develop the knack.
Any other takers???

[Dave Humphries]

Jack, Hi

~ practice makes perfect.
In time I'll develop the knack. ~

It certainly does, and you will.
I am still very much a PP novice myself, and I only have Elements 6 to play with - so much less to get wrong than if I had PS proper

On that topic of making things manageable; I generally don't use layers (except for adding text), I work on the background layer and rely on undo (Ctrl-Z)/redo (Ctrl-Y) and the history palette to back out when things start going wrong. If I make a really big boo-boo, I always have the original unedited RAW (or jpg) to re-open and start over. In time, I expect I'll see the benefit of using layers and start to do so, but for now I have enough on my plate with the basics. But it probably explains why my shots don't stand up well against the far more experienced people here, but the Roman empire wasn't built in a day.

So, as long as you never save over the original filename, you could try what I do to make life simpler to start with. I accept this will make some of the suggestions impossible, as they rely on layers, but I find it works for me.

Apologies to anyone who feels I am encouraging 'bad habits' here, feel free to correct me with a gentle introduction so I too can be 'converted'.

Good luck Jack,

[Colin Southern]

Apologies to anyone who feels I am encouraging 'bad habits' here, feel free to correct me with a gentle introduction so I too can be 'converted'.

Hi Dave,

I hate to say it - but if you're not using layers then you're probably making a lot of work for yourself

Best thing about them is that they don't alter the base image - so at anytime you can toggle them off and on to see the effect - adjust the likes of levels and saturation at will - and even discard them completely if it's not working for you.

History is good up to a point but it defaults to a max of 20 states - and can only be extended to a max of 50 - and it's easy to whizz past that number when doing things like spot removal or dodging & burning.

Scott Kelby has some wonderful introductory books on using them if anyone would like a recommendation (or two).

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Colin,

I'm sure you're right and I do occasionally use them.

Roll out my excuses:
I'm not sure if it's because some of the layer mask capabilities in PS3/4 are not fully supported in PS Elements and the feature extraction wasn't done too well, but I find trying to follow some things to do with layers almost impossible, perhaps because (maybe) they're written for PS and Elements calls things by a different name. I'm sure Elements can do a lot, as I say, it offers an awful lot of blend modes and I never know which to use.

When I have finished reading your last reccomended book (thank you), I can accomodate a new one; I do 'get on' with Scott K's style.
I was given a couple of PSE6 books as presents, not his unfortunately, so I was trying not to duplicate, but maybe I should, or try harder with what I have now (first).

Cheers,