06-27-12 – Birds 2: Boid Watching

geom_00, as ennui said, it’s a lot of personal preference, and monitor differences can factor into it as well, but I also found the edited version to be a bit oversaturated and a little dark.

I started with your original and just tweaked the curves a bit to get this version. I first adjusted the curves altogether to get the brightness level I wanted; then I used the color picker to look at the color of a spot I thought should be white. I then adjusted the individual curves to make the white spot’s RGB values equal. Here’s what the curves looked like. I used Paint.NET (which is free), but I use Canon’s DPP on my own RAW files.

I’m loving this one…when it comes time to vote I won’t know which way to turn…the awesome, it’s everywhere!!!

I need some advice from you guys.

I feel that I am decent in the department of TAKING the pictures.

In the area of post processing however, I am as lost as a Farker at a health food convention.

I tried to do some modifications on this picture: http://i987.photobucket.com/albums/ae353/jpw173/Farktography/P6232624.jpg (Yes, that bird IS alive)

Here is the result of the processing. I worked only on the saturation, color, hue, and brightness/contrast:http://i987.photobucket.com/albums/ae353/jpw173/Farktography/BetterFalcom.jpg

Am I doing this right, or should I see if I can find a class on image processing?

Thanks!!

FWIW, unless you intend to use an image straight-out-of-camera, turn off all kinds of image adjustments and/or optimizations in your camera, shoot raw, not rare or medium.

That’ll give you something better to start with in post, IMHO.

Making my choices caused me chest pain. “Oooooo, I could use THAT one too!”

Can we increase the limit for this theme to, say, about 50 entries?

what you said without the chest pain. if anybody checked my entries are “bird-4” and 5 and 6. and that’s from just the ones that made it to save for web.

all that said there are as usual some really nice pictures tonight. nature seems to bring out the best in us.

Well, if you’re applying it across the entire image and increasing the levels/curve height of the highest values, I guess that would be ok. If you’re selectively choosing the background and applying different levels/curves to those sections of the image, that would not be ok.

Ok, it was across the whole image, thanks Els!