Barn owl flight: advice requested

Joseph,

I think this image has potential. I'd try Greg's method of combining a linear and normal conversion to try to control the hot whites.

I'd also crop, probably tighter than some like, but get the image to mostly owl. The large limb splitting the wing doesn't bother me too much but cloning is an option.


Good luck...jn

Joe:

I believe the picture is recoverable but it required some work in PS:

First: Shadow highlight recovery
Second: Levels, with the eye dropper adjust the whites.
Third: Select the right side of the face only and do a little highlight recovery there.
Fourth: With the elipse select the bird with afeather of 50, then invert the selection, with levels darken the background a litle.
Fifth: With the sponge brush at a low setting give a little more saturation oto the bek and the open mouth and also a litle to the forehead.

The result is not perfect and the reason is that they conduct this free flights shows at 10:00 AM when the sun is already high.

If you pay the museum $ 60 for a private show you can chose the time, I would recommend being there at 7:30AM
I hope it helped.

Nice shot, Joseph, and nice PS work by Juan as well. In addition to what Juan has suggested, you could also--right after step 4, with the background still selected--dial in a little touvch of gaussian blur. This will soften the background a bit and make the owl look that much sharper.

aj

I think this image does have some great potential. Since you provided permission for reposts, I did a quick crop to recompose - I like the branch the bird seems to have taken off from and was easily able to crop out other branches but still allow this one to lead into the frame to the bird:
I did not do anything but crop and convert the file to sRGB.

If you use Breezebrowser, one option with the 10D files is a "combined conversion", which puts together a linear and regularly converted file. For more control, you can just convert the image twice - once as a regular, once linear, and blend the two as indicated in this article:

http://www.naturescapes.net/092003/gd0903.htm

Finally, another quick item to note - when saving your images for the web, they are best represented as sRGB. I believe this file is in Adobe 1998 format, which may be viewed differently than intended by the various browsers.

Hope this helps!

Juan, Jim, AJ, Heather,
Thank you very much for these most helpful suggestions. I will take this image and see what I can do with it utilizing these thoughts.