Sweet cub

Nice shot Basri! It was very nice of the cub to pose so well for you! Very nice light and detail. Good capture!

You must have been ecstatic when he stepped up onto that boulder and did that "king of the world" pose! Great separation of the subject from the background. On my monitor I find that the white balance still seems off, just in a different direction; seeing a definite magenta shift, sort of red/purple, particularly in the rock and white fur underparts. I would think that the 1DX would have good auto white balance straight out of the camera. Not a problem since you were in raw, just needs a little more time in photoshop. Some folks use the white eye dropper to adjust color balance. I have found LR4's color temp slider to work pretty well for minor adjustments.

I think the color is much improved over your previous cheetah posts. However, I agree with Gary. The color is still just a bit off. I love the pose, but I see a little noise. Also, the image appears a bit soft on my monitor. Congrauulations on a nice capture. I hope to see a cheetah so cooperative some time in the future.

Love the pose and soft light, Basri. To me the colours are still WAY off, sorry to say. Oodles of magenta coming through in the mound and the cheetah... ...plus some blue in the whites.

I'd love to do a quick repost to show you where you should aim...if you give me the green light I'd like to save your larger file and rework and post it here...

[Love the pose and soft light, Basri. To me the colours are still WAY off, sorry to say. Oodles of magenta coming through in the mound and the cheetah... ...plus some blue in the whites.

I'd love to do a quick repost to show you where you should aim...if you give me the green light I'd like to save your larger file and rework and post it here...]

Morkel, thank you very much indeed for your kind attention,
If you do rework, repost and if you please briefly inform me what sort of post processes you applied will be big favour to me.

I'm looking forward your corrected repost, ones again thank you very much in advance.

Lovely pose! If you remove the magenta cast, I think this will be a wall hanger.

Thanks for your permission, Basri.

In this repost which I worked on very quickly, I basically did the following:
1. COLOR BALANCE: set the sliders away from magenta and blue towards green and yellow, for shadows, midtones and highlights

2. SATURATION: I desaturated magenta, blue and cyan by almost 60 points each. I also removed about 10 points of red saturation.

3. I then cleaned up the whites by dodging the highlights and midtones on the cheetah.

What do you think?

Rework looks very good, nice job Morkel.

Morkel, Thank you very much for your rework, yes it's looking realy natural now.
I fully understud what type of simple ''unforced error'' I was doing. As this is the field ''nature and wild life'', it is obvious that ''image must be natural''.
I'll rework all my cheetah photos and I may repost some of them later. Ones again, thank you so much for your valuable effort.

I have also appreciated all friends supporting by sending their comment and constructive criticism.

Very nice pose. The reworked image that Morkel did looks much better. However, I disagree with your statement "As this is the field ''nature and wild life'', it is obvious that ''image must be natural''."

Nature photography is an art form, and in art there are no rules. You decide what you like best. If you want to stay as close to what you saw at the time, that's fine. And if you want to completely change the mood with white balance, shutter speeds, filters and Photoshop, that's fine as well.

As long as you're not shooting for the news, scientific research, forensic evidence or educational purposes, you should not limit your creativity to copying reality. Just my personal thoughts.

I'll be in Sabi Sand in a few months - can't wait.

Hello Marsel,
Thank you very much for your encouraging comment. I'm 100% agree with you. I think I couldn't explain exactly what I mean. It would be much better to say something like that; Wild life images; better not to be ''looking artificial''.
Coming back to this cub image and previous cheetah images, I have chosen to do colorful post process instead of pale light yellow cheetah color. But I know now, manipulation was excessive.

Many thanks to these lovely Sabi Sand Cheetahs, inspiring this very informative technical and philosophic discussions for me.
And, of course so many thanks to all wild life photography Gurus, joining this forum with their constructive comments.

Ones again I really thank you very much.

By the way, I had a look your web site, all the images are wonderfull, I loved the image from Japan. I really love to be there.

Excellent shot with the pose and lighting, nice job in getting this, well done.