Followed this guy for about a half mile down the shoreline until he finally settled. This is taken on the shoreline of Owen Beach in Point Defiance Park, Washington. I cropped heavily but there is a bit of blur I am trying to correct. Here is the original shot and the cropped image. Others have shown some incredible images and insights so I am interested in how others approach this in Darktable (4.8.1) as I am still learning the modules and workflow. Other software solutions are welcome because I will eventually try other ideas once I get my head wrapped around DT.
Rather than do my own edit I decided to look at what you had done and see what I could easily improve. I have made just two changes here.
The first was I activated the local contrast module. This gives the illusion of a sharper image and I use this module on most of my images.
The second was the diffuse or sharpen module. I was unsure if you had used a preset here or adjusted the sliders yourself, but I left them alone. However, what I did do was to limit the sharpening to the detail of the bird and not sharpen the noise in the background. This was achieved by activating the mask option and then adjusting the details threshold slider to a positive value. This is best done with the mask being visualized.
The final result was still your edit, but what I feel are a couple of improvements.
TY. I like the masking especially. Sharpening tended to clutter the image with noise and I am still getting used to masking. This helps to understand better.
Not that I know my birds that well but I was on google looking for images to guage the hue of the blue as its quite a dark image and likely I thought there was more color… but in that process your shot looks more like a belted than a banded kingfisher from the shots on line…do you think??
Any way it wasn’t too helpful as there was a pretty wide range from almost charcoal grey to almost indigo blue…maybe due to regional differences, age and sex of the birds?? Again no idea…
The region where the image was taken also gives a hint: the banded kingfisher is an Asian species, the belter kignfisher is North American
The colour differences could be regional, but they could also be due to differences in ligthing or age of the feathers. Especially blue colours appear very variable, as those are not a pigments, but due to the microstructure of the feathers. More directional light tends to give brighter blues, while very diffuse light give much duller/grayer blues.
And, of course, there’s the post-processing of the images…
I like the level of color and tone you picked. I think you hit a nice balance of the bird against the background… There is a bit of weirdness around the eye and throat (base of the beak) …maybe D or S artifacts?? You don’t really see it too much if you are zoomed out though…
Thanx.
While I see some of the weirdness on the throat, I don’t see it around the eye. In the end it will be simply noise which escaped my control. I struggled a lot to find a good balance between sharpness and noise.
Ya its a pretty daunting task to sharpen a massive crop like that …I just saw some exaggerated.harsh gradients in and around the base of of the beak and throat that are likely a combination of jpg artifacts when trying to introduce sharpening at that level. I didn’t have access to DT to see where or if I could see the source from an editing perspective but its not a big deal
