A great day for birds!

[Copy_Kot]

Today was a great day for shooting birds, I saw my fourth pileated woodpecker, a little bird that I will have to look up (or ask Paulnj ), and I nearly froze to death taking these…













It was worth it! It was my first time seeing Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum).

There was very little post processing done, just a very slight tone adjustment, and a little sharpening… no cropping.

[Loupey]

Great day indeed. Looks like a terrific location - better stay there until all the berries disappear!

We had a great turnout here too and nice lighting. Had a camera in-hand off and on in the morning. Not 45 minutes ago, I went upstairs to retrieve something and heard my family yelling for me from downstairs. A hawk that I've been trying to capture all summer/fall had just landed in a tree not 20 yards from the house. Took off before I could make it down

Looks like you had better success

[Copy_Kot]

Thanks Loupey, I see hawks all week long... sometimes two or three a day, I haven't been able to get an image of one yet

[quetzal]

Great shots! I photographed one near my home this past spring, my first time seeing them also. Those are the best days - when its your first time seeing a species AND photographing it. Good job

[Copy_Kot]

Those are the best days - when its your first time seeing a species AND photographing it. Good job

I think that's what makes it so addictive. And thank you Quetzal.

[Sushigaijin]

These images are great! they are sharp, colorful, composed well..i feel like i was there. however, they desperately need a levels adjustment; the darkest tone is just below middle gray, and "white" is definately grayer than true white. A little real black and real white will improve these shots very much - say the word and I'll have a go.

Erik.

[Sushigaijin]

actually, having found a post of your waxwings as a "please edit me" in the computer stuff forum, I am going to take that as permission to edit here - please let me know otherwise.

layer>adjustment layer>levels; changed output to 5 and 250 first, then adjusted the sliders to make black black and white white. The output adjustment is to average the error in most output circumstances, most displays and photo printers do poorly at displaying 1-5 and 250-255.

In fact, many displays do worse than that, but I'm only trying to make the image better for an average of people. Some monitors are so uncalibrated that any editing at all will be lost on them, but I imagine that most of us on photography forums will at least appreciate the difference. This levels adjustment will make the image better for display, but now the image itself is overexposed and oversaturated.

Layer>adjustment layer>curves; brought the mid tones down just a touch (eyeballed it) until the shot looked properly exposed - not rocket science.

layer>adjustment layer>hue/saturation; dropped saturation -18, again just eyeballing it. the berries now look more like berries than flaming suns. It was possible to make an adjustment that would produce the desired result in curves - select the red curve and adjust until correct, but I find that playing too much with the curves leaves photos kind of blotchy. I chose to reduce saturation instead, and I think it was the right choice.

duplicate background layer.

Filter>high pass> 0.8 px

mode>overlay

master opacity>50%

This is a pretty standard high pass sharpening procedure, I used this because the Jpeg compression made the image noisy - USM or smart sharpen might introduce more noise than I like.

layer>flatten image

filter>sharpen>smart sharpen> 0.3 radius, 35%.

The high pass did a good job sharpening the hard edges, this just perks up the details a bit for the harsh squeeze into jpeg compression, around 120k.



it took a lot longer to explain what I did and why than it did to edit the shot, it was really less than a minute of adjustments. granted this would look better if we started with a full resolution shot, but it really isn't bad for what it is. The berries are super noisy, but it looks like jpg artifact to me.

Erik.

[Copy_Kot]

Wow Erik, that looks great! I'm going to print out your post (and the replies from the other thread) and try doing the same editing with some other images.

[Knight]

Great shoot They are kinda rare in my neck of the woods . I have only capture 1 about a year ago . I have never seen so many lol