Juvenile Crested Caraca

Although I've seen these birds in FL, TX, and here in AZ, I've never had one close enough for a shot like this.

The composition here is good, as is the bird's position relative to the camera position. It would be better if it was sharper, and if the shot had a little more exposure to bring out detail in the dark feathers.

As with many posts of birds against blue sky this image shows a noticeable halo where the bird meets the sky. This happens somewhere in raw conversion (too much Clarity) or post processing (shadow recovery or exposure increase with levels or curves). Avoid the halo by making a careful selection of the subject before using shadow/highlight adjustments.

The halo shows to me in the original version, but it is easier to see in photoshop when a threshold layer has been added as in the image provided. Moving the slider to lower values will show the halo around the rest of the bird.

Well Richard, thank you for this info. I do make selective sharpening and adjustments, and rarely use clarity. I do notice that I do get broad halos around birds against a blue sky, and more often than not I notice it before doing any PPing. What causes it is a mystery to me so far. I try not to oversharpen in camera, avoiding the thin halo also. I took this back into PS, and applied the Threshold Layer and have learned something new here today. Thank you for taking the time to share your finding and posting them...I appreciate your feedback.

Doug, I like the eye contact with that slight tilt of the head. I thought the exposure looked pretty good overall though some more detail in the darks would be nice.

Richard's tips regarding halos and threshold layers are excellent. He told me about threshold long ago and now I never post an image without doing a threshold layer first - to check for halos and for the brightness of my whites. I find that even global sharpening causes halos, esp against blue skies, unless I do it selectively on the bird.

Doug:

I'm not sure I understand your work flow. If you are shooting in raw then in-camera settings like sharpening shouldn't be dragged along into photoshop. But if you do your initial processing in Nikon Capture before transferring the file to photoshop then the in-camera settings could be applied to the image. I don't use Capture so I don't know if that function can be turned off.

Since you are already doing selective processing when you made some of your adjustments all I can think of is that the selection edge may be too gradual. I mostly use the Quick Select tool and that seems to avoid the problem; other ways of making selections may result in a more gradual edge for the selection and allow the adjustment to bleed beyond the area you are intending to modify. Consider evaluating your selection boundary with the "adjust selection" option to see how much spill there might be.

Very nice pose and good exposure, Doug. It looks like you focus was excellent, but the bird seems a bit noisy to me and I'm not sure why. There's a touch of blue fringe around the tail, which I always have a problem with on some subjects against the sky. I like the light on the head and breast and the nice clear eye.

I really like that wide open wing position and your placement of the bird in the frame. Looks like he has some well worn wing feathers too.

Richard,
I was using Nikon Capture at the time I processed this image and imagine that the camera settings were taken into PS. I have since started using the ACR in PSE8, and find it much easier to work in.

My workflow begins in the ACR, making ajustments to exposure, brightness,and color mainly. I do all my sharpening and selective shadow/highlight adjustments after converting to jpeg. On a shot such as this I usually use the magic wand and clicking off contiguous so all of the blue sky is selected. I will even zoom to 100% and look for stray pixels and to see where the boundaries are around the bird, and if need be I will contract or expand to get it as close as possible. The next step I take is to reduce noise. The last step I take is to invert my selection and do the shadow/highlights if needed and lastly,sharpening of the bird. After that it is resized for posting or saved in jpeg format. I'm still a bit puzzled as to where the halo comes from.

I was out this morning taking flight shots of Osprey,BE's and cormorants. I am going to go through these images and use what I've learned from you as far as the threshhold layer and see what my results are.

I would just like to thank you again for taking your time to eductae me on this. I am very grateful to you, and everyone here who has helped me to become a better photographer and image proccessor.

Sounds like you are on the right track in processing. Using Nikon Capture with in-camera sharpening and other image enhancements might be the source of the nimbus. I avoid all these and begin work on the raw file in ACR.

Make sure you have the auto settings turned off for ACR. I'm not sure how you do that in PSE8 but it should be fairly obvious to do or figure out. The auto setting can make major adjustments to your raw file without you even noticing. With the Auto setting turned off you'll see all your raw files consistently and any exposure issues will be much easier to detect.

The only other thought that comes to mind at present is to do each adjustment you mention on a separate layer (I'm interpreting your description as doing the NR and the S/H on the same layer just be inverting the selection). If you put these adjustments on separate layers you should get an accompanying mask for the layer that you can fine tune.

I'm glad to share knowledge and help anyone willing to listen. We all started somewhere on the learning curve, after all.

Richard, you are correct in your interpretation of doing NR, sharpening etc. on the same layer. I will make adjustment layers from here on. I also found that the ACR did have a default that was not set to zero. I have changed that so the default makes no changes whatsoever.
I've been reading on High Pass filter sharpening, and luminosity info sharpening. Just from what little I've played with it, I can see this will be the direction I more than likely will take in the future.

Doug,

I like the flight pose, eye contact and how the wings are spread. Richard has given you some great advice about how to avoid the halo and about other postprocessing. I can't improve on that. The exposure could have been a bit brighter for the darks, your exif shows -0.7 EV comp, I generally use positive EV comp with a dark bird against a blue sky and that can help bring out more detail in the darks.