Goldfinch critique

[Trik]

Try cropping landscape rather than portrait view. That may satisfy some of the critiques - tighter at the top and space to the left for the bird to "look into", for example.

[momji1971]

Hi Toby. Nice shot, especially with a tc on the bigma! Well done!

For future shots, see how you like the shot when taken from the same level as the bird. Noticed this one is shot from below.

Also, have a go at taking a number of shots in quick succession. Try to get the bird looking slightly towards you and see how that looks. Eye contact really helps bring the viewer in. It also means the head, eye and beak are on the same plane of focus so the important bits are always sharp.

Just a few tips, not rules, you're doing great!

Happy shooting.

cheers.
Stu.

[DOXHOPE]

A good shot of a male goldie, spot on..even if I hate that lense, but love that camera

[acherontia]

Nice bird shot.
Have you selected and put the bird on a different background? I may be totally wrong but it looks as though you have selected without enough feathering being applied - it sort of has a 'hard edge' around the bird and branch.
Of course this could be due to other factions - such as contrast/sharpening and if it is I apologise for my suspicions.

Other than that it is a lovely image - but as others have said there's a little too much 'weight' at the top.

Acher

[Tobyh]

Hi acherontia,

Thanks for the reply.

No - the bird has not been added, what you see is how the shot was taken. Did you view the picture full size? sometimes it shows less clearly when it's compressed for the smaller image often with a reasonable amount of softness which is totally different from the full size image.

It's quite a clean background which makes the edges stand out a little more I guess.

Comments noted for future efforts though, thanks all.


TobyH

[acherontia]

Originally Posted by Tobyh

Hi acherontia,

Thanks for the reply.

No - the bird has not been added, what you see is how the shot was taken. Did you view the picture full size? sometimes it shows less clearly when it's compressed for the smaller image often with a reasonable amount of softness which is totally different from the full size image.

It's quite a clean background which makes the edges stand out a little more I guess.

Comments noted for future efforts though, thanks all.


TobyH

It sometimes looks that way when there's a lot of contrast between subject and background -especially on a 72 res . Glad you didn't take my question the wrong way
I'm overloaded (verbally and visually) at the moment with OH's image manipulation techniques so probably had my 'extract ' and 'select' head on

Acher

[PMG]

Just found this and decided to 'do' rather than 'describe' in the hope that its helpful and not upsetting Toby?

There are two uploaded into Picture Critique Gallery cos I keep forgetting to lighten my pics before uploading - so I've done it a second time the way that it displays on my monitor!

First let me say your goldfinch pic is a cracker without anything doing to it and would stand by itself without anything else and had it been done on slide film that would have been a good shot well done and that would be it!

But - with digi you have otions to tinker and six years ago I would have said 'no tinkering' not right ........ now all the way down the dark side I say 'improve' your pic (its your pic after all!) in a way that takes it to what your eyes saw - or what you thought you saw and you won't go far wrong!

If you think tinkering with PSP and Adobe is wrong then the only thing I would have suggested was the 'flashlight' needed to go ..... when you put a catchlight into a birds eye it has to be in the right place where you know the daylight is falling most brightly - I've added fake catchlights to some of mine - or simply just lightened an area to stop the bird looking 'stuffed' or 'dead'!!

Anyway here is what I did - and some of it not as carefully or un-obtrusive as it might have been working on the full size pic:

1. Cloned out flashlight, picked up the daylight 'catch' with magic wand and lightened it in Gamma
2. Cloned branches out in the background near the bird then magic wand selected the background and bucket tooled an even grey taken from the background grey. Cloned out any obvious joins and worked around the branch and feet where light areas showed (not made an excellent job of this - on the original you can do this very carefully with good results)
3. Cloned out dirty marks on its breast!
4. Took pic from PSP to Adobe, selected the background, used gradient tool and pulled an ND grey from top to bottom
5. Took pic back to PSP (only cos I prefer PSP - can all be done in Adobe but I don't know my way around Adobe as much) and cloned around any obvious unmatching bits
6. Selected the bird and saturated very slightly
7. Selected the nearest parts of the bird and sharpened slightly
8. Selected just the head and sharpened a little more and lightened in curves very very slightly
9. Lightened the whole image in curves very slightly

There are areas in the background that are not even and I wouldn't neccessarily make them over even as that can begin to look false and in fact with the original to work on I may have chosen to select the background and add a severe blur (Guassian? sp?) and that may look more natural.

I don't do this kind of work with all my shots but with an image that is already good to excellent but has distracting stuff in it then I consider its worth the effort to make improvements and turn a pic into a 'Wow' ......

Thats my approach - feel free to throw rotten tomatoes if you don't agree!!!

Pauline

[acherontia]

Good advice ,Pauline.
A good image can always be improved by post processing. But - a bad image can't be made good! I PS as little as possible but it's certainly necessary to improve in PS - I use CS4 and will shortly move to Lightroom. On a good image that I think has all the sharpness needed/good pose/ etc etc I will clean marks (I have a really annoying mirror spot on the macro I haven't cleaned yet ) and remove annoying little intrusions that spoil the crop etc etc.

I used to be a bit 'precious' when I started photography and would keep things that would now just go straight in the trash - but that's learning.

I'm sure Tobyh and others will appreciate the time you've taken to explain some of these techniques - a critique should be a critique, after all, as we'd never learn without external advice and constructive criticism - something that seems to be going out of fashion in these days

One thing some people get wrong is putting a perfectly circular catchlight of the same brightness in the eye - it's never ever like that if you look carefully - the lens reflects what is there and mine often have me in! Selecting and brightening , as you said, is a good way to do it if it's there.

There's a tree and bushes in this eye but I'm there somewhere in the middle! LOL (Sorry about the beginnings of obvious pixilation at this magnification.)



Acher

[PMG]

A good illustration Archer - its amazing sometimes what can be seen reflected in particularly an animals eyes when you photograph it! With us at the caravan its usually the dome hide that can clearly be seen if you blow the pic size up!!

To go back to my earlier post - my explanation is a bit garbled I see now (early onset senile dementia I reckon and I'm not joking ........) I didn't make it really clear that I meant that I had cloned out the flash catchlight - when the flash appears in the middle of the eye then it never looks right as you know that it isn't sunlight. When - as in the goldfinches case - there is a lovely daylight reflection from the sky then catch that with the lasso tool and lighten in curves or gamma (expeeriment with both for the effect you want - the most natural looking may poss be gamma reduction) this will lift the expression tons! But if you have a dark eye without daylight reflections and want a catch light as tho its sunlight - the most natural way to do this is to look back thro your own sunlight pics till you find one with a sunlight catch and clone/right click or copy a little patch containing it and clone or past into the dull eye on your new image - but first study where on the dull eye the catchlight would have been if the sun had caught it and place your 'fake' catchlight at that point, pull out to normal size and see if it looks natural .... if it does and has added a fair amount of 'punch' to the pic then job done!

Pauline

PS Looking at the goldfinch now tonight I would definitely try selection of the background and a strong blur - it will prob look much more natural - partly cos we have all seen those blurry branches and know that they are there - if we hadn't seen the image until it had been altered then our brains would not be thinking about the alteration!!

[acherontia]

There's a really handy tool on CS4 Bridge called 'Adjustment brush'. This can be used to use any adjustments such as brightness/saturation/contrast etc etc on a specific area without the need to select.
Re the branches - I think that some hint of what is there is fine.
Andy Rouse popularised the art of 'bird on blank background' (I often suspected some was manipulated) but personally speaking, I prefer to see some sense of the environment that 'anchors' the creature in the image.

ie -




Now - speaking of too much intrusion, a gaussian blur is a handy thing and here I've gone a bit further than just that as the background was incrediblt busy



I don't often play about like the last one but sometimes it's good to keep the PS hand in - it's as much an art as the actual taking of the image.

Pat