Cardinal in Cedar

Very interesting lighting to give the spotlight effect here. Is the vignetting of the colors natural or something that was enhanced in ps?

The spotlighting effect is interesting. Did you adjust to get it or is this the actual appearance? You shot supports my thesis that the female is the prettier Cardinal...

I like the shot quite a lot and the spotlighting effect is nice but the processing looks too contrasty to me and possibly over sharpened.

Jim, I like the overall affect of the "spotlight" lighting on this. To me the image looks a bit oversharpened. If this were mine I would reprocess this with less sharpening. I think you have a winner with the sharpen and thus the contrast toned down a bit.

I really like the pose here Jim, background looks good. Great shot, just wonder about the spotlight vs. the already mentioned sharpening and contrast. The beak color looks a little to vivid to me. Otherwise, this is great.

Thanks for the comments!

Contrast & sharpening: For some reason, this image did not upload well and contrast seemed to increase significantly - to the point that I almost deleted it. The same effect seemed to hit the sharpening. The original really looks very different on this front. I'll have to play around with my upload processing and try to figure out what happened.

Vignette & saturation: The saturation is very close to 'out of the camera' in keeping with my usual practice. This bird did have a brilliant beak - I've actually toned down some of the highlights. The vignette is a result of the original image exposure being decreased to pull down the hot center light from the sunbeam. This also darkened/reddened the cedar and I augmented the natural vignette to make it more pronounced.

Jim - I agree, the female cardinal is far more subtle and interesting!