Monday, July 26, 2010

MD Osprey Chick 2010

From http://natureandwildlifephotography.blogspot.com/

One of the 3 Osprey chicks from the nest in Maryland.

MD Osprey Chick

With this blog post I'm going to show how I edit and crop for effect. Here's the original photo with no cropping and just my base Lightroom import settings. These Lightroom settings include - saturation, whitebalance, and defringe edge correction. I have a preset for the settings I like to use as my own defaults for import. It took me a little while to come up with them, nothing too special, I just got tired of doing the same settings every time. Once these defaults are applied I often tweak them more.



The nest is distracting and the twig on the right meant I needed to crop tight. If I had a longer lens I would have shot tighter...

Levels adjusted to white out the background and contrast added to make the bird's tones stronger.

The feathers around the chicks neck were also sharpened using Unsharp Mask in Photoshop. Generally I do a couple minutes in Lightroom, and then a couple minutes to reduce the image for posting and add the final adjustments like sharpening in Photoshop.

--50--

Nikographer.com / Jon
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1 comments:

John said...

Lovely Osprey picture! I had the privilege of seeing an Osprey chick take it's first leaps into the air a few weeks ago here in England.