Avocets

One from Titchwell in the spring. It was early morning so the light was a bit challenging. I really like this image but feel but it's beyond my skills to maximise it. The whites I find particularly difficult to control. Any suggestions gratefully received!
Techs 1D2N, 500/4 with 1.4 converter, ISO250, f/7.1, 1/1600 sec
All best,
Dave

Hi Dave - a nice behavioural shot

Re-open the CR2 file in PS and do your crop.
Go Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels
Click OK in the layer naming box
Go to the 3 eye dropper tools at the bottom and double-click the left one (Blacks)
Set the HSB figures to 0,0,5 respectively and click OK
Double-click the right eye-dropper and set the HSB figures to 0,0,95 and click OK

Now single click the blacks eye-dropper and select the blackest black area in your image - if this is hard to find then put the cursor on the input levels BLACKS slider hold down the left mouse key and press Alt key, the image will turn white and then move the slider to the right until a few pixels begin to appear - these are your blackest blacks, so select them with the eye-dropper.

Do the same for the whites with the right eye-dropper - now you have set your black and white points.

If you want to you can select the middle dropper - mid-tone - and click this in the image on what you feel best represents the midtones, doing this correctly will remove any cast on the image too, but select the wrong pixels and your colour will go all over the place

Personally I very rarely use the midtone picker, any overall colour change I do with the colour balance tools.

Worth a go Dave as it's a very nice image

I frequently use an incident meter to assess the amount of light in a scene and if I'm going in a hide I'll then find an even tone to spot meter that agrees with my incident reading or at least relates to it - 2/3rds up for example. I then have a reference that I can tweak depending on lightness or darkness of the subject at hand.

Regards

JohnS

Sweet shot David - what software are you using for photo editing? I would be helpful to know in order to make useful suggestions.

The only variation to the PS work suggested by Andy is not optomise the white point balance but only the black point - but that is entirley dependant upon the prevailing lighting conditions. In early/late light you may want to keep any red colour casts so your whites don't necessarily have to be a pure white - this helps preserve the atmosphere in the shot taken. The black point on the other hand should invariably be a purer black rather than a reddy black in dusk conditions - from my experience this is where some colour casts normally show themselves.

There is a greenish (?) colour cast to your image at present which is interfering with the early light glow on the white plumage - try optomising the black point only first to see if this fixes your problem. If this is only partially successful I would then suggest a small curves adjustment to the red channel only - pushing the mid point of the curve up very slightly to boost red channel in a gentle upwards curve - pulling the "diagonal line" into gentle curves under the channels function provides a more control over image tweaking than the simple 3 sliders available under the levels function.

Love the interaction Dave

I'm personally not very clued up on tricky PS corrections, and this shot would test me also, but no dought the above advice will help you tweak it some more.

Great that the eye is well defined, especially with these birds!!



Alan

Thanks for all this advice guys. I will try to decipher it all and see what I can do with it over the weekend. Theses are the things I badly need to learn. John - at the moment I'm messing about with Elements 2 but 4 is on it's way. I was going to buy CS3 but somehow a 70-200 lens appeared instead! If it's OK with the forum I'll re-post once I've tinkered with it?
All best
Dave

Ok David I thought I would ask because it is easy to assume that everyone here is using the full PS version. Myself I'm not at all familiar with Photoshop elements so I cann't help you with how to colour balance with it. However I do know there are some great free plugins for it which give it some of the key features of the full version (such as curves which I often use for colour balancing), Think some of the plugins are on a website called Earthbound Light, also through Google search you can find loads of tutorial material for element 4 on the web.

Have fun with the 70-200

had a quick play now I have got home from work - a real cracking image, I hadn't appreciated the kicked water droplets earlier on - a great behaviour shot

Nice interaction shown David and some good advice given above. I'll make a note of those myself Worth playing around with I reckon

Thankyou Mike you've worked a bit of magic with this! I'm now inspired to spend more time on getting the same result myself. This has pleased me no end becasue I really like this image!
Thanks again everbody for all the input on this, it's really appreciated.
Dave