Northern Cardinal is curious

Gear: Canon EOS 10D + Sigma 300-800mm f/5.6 EX, Wimberley + Velbon CF tripod.

Shooting info: 800mm, 1/250s, f/8.0, ISO 400, one-shot AF, Av priority, center-weighted metering.

Processing: ACR raw conversion, noise reduction, exposure mods, saturation decrease, background blur, USM, etc. in PSE 3.

Here is another photo from my spring '05 road trip, again taken at the Arivaca Cienega location of the Buenos Aires NWR in SE Arizona. This colorful Northern Cardinal, very similar in shade to my previously posted Summer Tanager, is getting ready to hop from one spot to another in a somewhat dense patch of vegetation. Despite the fact that he is a little beat up around the bill and not in the most photogenic of locations, he was so curious and fun to hang out with while I shot other subjects that I decided to try to rescue one of his images for posting. It turned out be a fun PS technique experience.

To get to this point, I spent quite a lot of PS time, nearly all of it triggered by deciding to take the cluttered background down several notches. Since the twigs upon which the bird is perched are an integral part of the clutter, it was a little work to create some separation. But the basic process was very similar to that illustrated by Christina Evans in her repost of Jim Neiger's recent dramatic Snail Kite "PS challenge" image.

I selected the cardinal out into its own layer, and did some minor s/h and USM on it. I also pulled out the twig the bird is immediately sitting on, and sharpened it a bit less. This layer included the closer part of the heavier, more OOF stick below to which the perch is attached. The back part of that heavy stick, and the other stick poking up and to the right, I selected out into yet another layer and performed a slight gaussian blur (radius 3) to put it a little further, perceptually, into the BG than the perch.

The rest of the background I left in a remaining base layer, reduced the brightness a bit and hit it with repeated runs of GB radius 7.5 -- about 4 or 5 repetitions of this filter. I used this tactic to take out detail in the BG without completely homogenizing the structure of the habitat as would happen with a larger radius GB -- I wanted to leave the impression of the environment (shapes, colors) but hopefully with much less distracting detail to draw the eye. Also, with larger radius blurs it's harder to prevent serious color bleed-over across areas that you don't really want mixed together -- say the red of a cardinal or green of a leaf with the brown of a branch.

All of the above in this case still wouldn't have visually worked without a bunch of other little tactics to prevent nasty edge effects and halos where the blurred BG overlapped with the other FG layers. For example, on the blurred BG layer I used the healing brush in "replace" mode (could have cloned) to roughly paint in hunks of adjacent BG color over top of the cardinal's red plumage, to prevent a pinkish halo from developing around the bird. I did the same other places where jarringly colored halos might develop.

In the case of both the bird and its direct perch, I also underlayed each primary FG layer with an identical layer containing the FG selection expanded by 1 pixel and feathered slightly larger (e.g. by ~3 pixels). On these underlayers I ran a GB of radius 1 to create an anti-alias effect along the edge of the overlayer, preventing a razor sharp, artifical looking edge where my FG layers laid over the now blurred BG. Thinking about it, I guess I'm more or less trying to simulate the anti-aliasing effect we expect to see from the Bayer masking in the digital camera process.

Comments and critiques on this image would be greatly appreciated, especially as regards the effectiveness of the technique described and any alternatives. As noted at the top I'm using PSE 3, but PSCS techniques would be of interest too.

(Please don't address the question of "why do it at all?" Altering digital images is an important topic and I do care about it, but I don't want to get into that topic here.)

For the curious, I include here a view of what the shot would look like without blurring the BG: