Snowy Egret on Silver River

floridafan

New member
DSC_1669sm.jpg
 

Bikerbrent

Senior Member
Nice shot of a tough subject. With the white bird in bright sunlight and the background in deep shade, some significant post processing might be the only way you might improve it.
 

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
Look at your histogram in your post processing software. Do you see the two red circled areas? Any colors that show up there mean the blacks and/or whites are clipped. I have my software set to show the clipping on my images. Black clipping displays as blue specs on images. Notice where the red arrow is pointing. White clipping displays as red specs. In addition to clipping whites on the heron's body, there is some clipping on the branch.

When clipping, it means no detail is showing up. The blacks are too dark to show any shadowed areas. The whites are too bright and will simply display as white without details. If you adjust your white clipping, you should be able to recover some highlights on the bird's body. The bird also looks a tad blue. Quite often when a subject is in a shadowed area, there will be a blue color cast. That can be adjusted either by changing the white balance of an image or using an adjustment brush. Watch some YouTube videos on how to adjust clipping. It isn't difficult. :)

And for a general critique of the image, the branch on the left is distracting. Unfortunately since it seems to be right in line with the heron, using a different aperture wouldn't have blurred it much, if at all. I'd try to remove it either with content aware or by cloning it. Raise the shadows a little to show some slight detail in the background. The area near the top of the image as well as on the upper left corner is too dark for my taste. The tree trunks in the background go from being a light bluish color suddenly to becoming dark. I would adjust that some so it looks more natural. And I'd remove the 2 twigs that are in front of the bird's body and tail. A little cloning or spot healing brush should be able to remove them.

I like the out of focus tree branch on the right. It gives some depth to the image.

Clipping.jpg
 
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