I was trying to get a shot of a red-belly that was flying around the yard today when these two downy’s showed up and put on a little show :D

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l48/paulk_68/_MG_6903.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l48/paulk_68/_MG_6910.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l48/paulk_68/_MG_6906.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l48/paulk_68/_MG_6911.jpg

I wish these would have turned out a little nicer…

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l48/paulk_68/_MG_6918.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l48/paulk_68/_MG_6923.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l48/paulk_68/_MG_6924-1.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l48/paulk_68/_MG_6925.jpg

Thanks for looking.

Awwww - how cute! He's flirting with her!

Super cool captures Copy_Kot . I C that you have the Feel Free to Help sign in your Signature so heres 20 minutes of CS2 for you , hope you like the changes :D

i get them little buggers on my hummingbird feeders!
suprised the heck out of me.

great series here!

OBie, I think they were fighting over turf... the best spot at the feeder, lol.

Thanks Knight, that looks pretty cool, what did you do to get the image to look like that?

Thanks for looking Porterm,

And thanks Paul, I have a lot of nice sharp images of them when they were just staring at each other but once the action began I couldn't stay focused on them.

nice captures, Copy. Knight, you edit looks oversharpened to me. here's what I mean.

http://www.sushigaijin.com/images/photos/sharpening/oversharpen.jpg

The halo is indicative of a large radius and high percentage for the shot. The detail on the breasts look oversharpened also, and the hard edges of the birds reveal it as well.

here's my edit, 10 minutes in photoshop. Less sharpening, tight radius. Clone job isn't the best, but it's workable. There is a little bit of halo above the left bird's head where I extracted the foreground, but that wouldn't be visible on a full resolution image. Only thing I might do differently on the full image is mask off the left edge of the tree so that the sharpening pass would totally miss it - the edge is sharp enough without me adding more contrast!!

Edit: Smoothed the bokeh with some serious noise reduction on a seperate layer. Yeah, looks a lot better without all the jpg and sensor noise.

http://www.sushigaijin.com/images/photos/sharpening/copy%20kot%20edit.jpg

Great rendition, Erik. Masks, layers, radiuses?!? Sounds like I can take some lessions from you.

Nice series, Copy!

Erik your gonna have to go into a little more detail to show me how you did this :) So i can do a retake and sharpen my limited CS2 skills :D

Thanks Erik and Loupey.

Erik, that looks awesome! More details please :)

Thank you once more Erik, I have quite a few images that I will be trying this with.

And... Paulnj or Loupey, this thread really should be split in two from Erik's first contribution down. His posts should be made into a sticky, at least for a little while. There is some outstanding information there and it would be a shame if that info was pushed down with the rest of this thread.