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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BackdoorArts" data-source="post: 243996" data-attributes="member: 9240">The birds were a hodge-podge, Rick.  I started in Lightroom where I took what was way too busy a flight shot and cropped it  so that it allowed you to focus on individual birds.  Otherwise the exposure was pretty good and all I needed to do was drag out some details.  Here's the cropped but otherwise untouched image.[ATTACH]65976[/ATTACH]I set about to try and bring out the missing details, which involved pulling back almost all the Highlights (-98) to get the feather detail and bumping the Clarity up a bit.  Then I sent it to Photoshop where, after using Dfine to remove noise, I used Viveza to bump the Structure a bit and tweak the warmth and saturation, and then I think I used the Dynamic Contrast filter in Perfect Effects to pull out some more details, which it's very good at doing without overdoing it.  It gave me a painterly effect, particularly with the birds on the ground, which I kinda liked.  I then saved it back to Lightroom, where I then did some color specific Luminance adjustments, pulling back the blues (-50) that got boosted in Viveza and brightening the yellow and orange (+9 each) to make the corn stalks pop.  I pulled back the Highlights again (-36) and sharpened.  It wasn't until I pulled back the highlights post-Photoshop that I got the greys in the wings, which I was very happy with.  A lot of playing for what amounts to a rather subtle difference in terms of what you see coming out of the camera, but the structure adjustments really make the difference in this for me across the board, even down to seeing the differentiations in the leftover corn stalks in the field.</blockquote>

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