It’s hummingbird season here in Northern Virginia, where we have numbers of them battling it out for patches of bright flowers, and the activity is going to increase as they begin migrating south.
Here’s one that I took this morning that I thought would be fun to play with. My challenge is the bright red flower that dominated the original. I had toned it down a bit and am happy with the scarlet color but I still feel I could do more to pull more detail out of the petals, and I also think the subject is a bit dark.
Thanks to everyone who provided their edits. The biggest challenge were the harsh lighting conditions. I was able to position myself to minimize shadows, but the direct sun really lit up those flowers. The other challenge that there were four of five of these hummers all engaged in dog fights so they wouldn’t stay still very long.
I think one of the biggest problems with this photo is the “red blob” syndrome where I’m pushing gamut limits. As @priort noted, I have to either decrease saturation or brightness to restore detail. The color equalizer is an excellent tool to do deal with it, but I still wind up with photos that lose the vibrancy of the bloom that the hummingbirds find so attractive.
Wow, the hardest part of this image to deal with were the JPEG artifacts, finally gave up and saved to a bloated PNG…
Personally, I think if there’s a part of the image to be emphasized, composition should be addressed first. Also, I don’t have a good tool to address out-of-gamut for your R7…
I’d be interested on your thoughts on composition.
@priort - interesting renders with definite improvement in details, but a tad shy on the chromacity… of course that might not be possible given the gamut considerations
The bird is pretty-well centered in the frame already, just don’t need as much flower. I left enough to convey the color, and the larger bird now draws more attention. I played a bit with rule-a-thirds, but the centered bird just makes sense to me. Generally, I look for lines and shapes, and try to organize them to convey depth and lead the eye into the scene. When the subject is ‘planar’, like this, I just go for dominance…
I don’t apologize for cropping, some shooting just requires it. I mean, were you able to convince the bird to sit still while you framed it?
I had actually masked the flower and used CB to drop the vibrancy and maybe tried to restrict it to a certain channel… I forget now …but I went back as I always forget the gamut slider in CC module…its does a nice job to keep that color that you like and still tease out the color blobs…
Taking off the CB desaturation …you can see the change in the flower from what I posted above
I think actually turning off the CB I used originally and not using the color eq either as I did above but using the smooth preset which works nicely for these flowers might be the best looking result to my eye…
