Three garden birds

[Viking]

I don't have any feeders in the garden, just plenty of grass and shrubs. The three most common are blackbirds, chaffinch and wood pigeon. Living close to the River Thames there are plenty of swans.

[MichaelF]

Image size seems fine to me. The Wood Pigeon is perhaps a bit over-saturated for colour (and has acquired a stray 'd' :D)

[Viking]

What do you mean by a stray 'd' ?

[Colin Key]

What do you mean by a stray 'd' ?

You spelt Pigeon as "Pidgeon" :ohdear:.

Colin

P.S. I suppose that is Anglo-American - the Yanks spell it as "Pidjun" :laugh:

[Colin Key]

Have only time to re-do one of these shots, the Starling:

http://www.pbase.com/accentor/image/113609110.jpg

In Photoshop:

1. Adjust shadows & highlights using "Levels"

2. Adjusted colour (reduced both hue and saturation)

3. Increased brightness and contrast

4. Reduced noise in Neat Image

5. Sharpened with "Unsharp Mask"

6. Saved as a JPEG at maximum quality (12 in PS)

I could have done more with the original "un-cooked" image.

Colin

[Viking]

Colin,

You picked one image where I have simply taken it through ACR 5.3 and cropped in PS. I thought it looked fine without any further processing.

You seem to have used a lot of tools - to produce what? Clearly, something that you feel is a sufficient improvement to merit posting. Perhaps its just my ageing eyesight.

John

[Colin Key]

Colin,

You picked one image where I have simply taken it through ACR 5.3 and cropped in PS. I thought it looked fine without any further processing.

You seem to have used a lot of tools - to produce what? Clearly, something that you feel is a sufficient improvement to merit posting. Perhaps its just my ageing eyesight.

John

John,

I did what I could with a very mediocre image; as I said, it is difficult to improve on an image which has already been processed and re-sized. If you cannot see the improved detail in the "shadows" then maybe you do have an eyesight problem. As to using "a lot of tools", this took me less than a minute to process.

I cannot get any Exif data from your images so do not know what the camera settings were or even which camera and lens was used.

With a 40D and a 100-400mm lens you have the gear to obtain superb images, if you know what you are doing. These three images all show very poor exposure and I suspect that they were shot in JPEG format with far too much in-camera processing. Why not shoot in RAW and use Canon's own DPP software to convert to 8-bit TIFF and work on that in PSE7 (currently available from Amazon at half price, about £50 - it would be money well-spent and much better than ACR). I would also suggest adding "Neat Image" as a noise reduction plug-in - all of your images have a very high degree of noise.

You cannot post partly-processed images like these and expect others to "have a bash" and make improvements - it is the equivalent of trying to re-heat an omelette and expecting it to taste better.

I gave my list of actions used in Photoshop more as a guide to what you might try to do yourself, rather than as an explanation as to how I have transformed your image into something fantastic (which is impossible). If you want some more detailed advice and care to send me an original, large "out of camera" image file (PM me and I will give you my email address) I will be happy to oblige.

On the other hand, if you don't want advice and help then simply don't ask for it.

This is a photo of a Woodchat Shrike taken with a "....py" Canon 400D body and an even "....pier" EF 70-210 "film" lens, but shot in RAW, converted to TIFF in DPP and processed in PSE6 on an iMac; it is a 60% crop:

http://www.pbase.com/accentor/image/79687104.jpg

With the gear you have you ought to be capable of much better images.


Colin :notworthy: