I am a newbie to this forum and editing in general. So far the beginner workflows I found in the manuals or youtube tutorials have worked pretty well in getting me to a decent image from RAW.
Technique/technical skills is one aspect of it, I also seem to lack a “vision” - so to say - of what I want from my images. Figured I might hit two birds (metaphorically, of course) watching your edits.
Welcome to the forum. Here is my attempt with DT. I didn’t worry about the WB but maybe it would benefit from some warming up. DSC_6163.NEF.xmp (18.9 KB)
Something non-standard from me again. I wanted to blur the background, but I tried subtract blend mode and decided that the darker background was a good idea. I think tone equaliser would be a good idea at the start so you can get more contrast in the bird without completely removing the background.
Also tried the split toning module to add more of a ‘shade’ look.
Good point about ‘vision’ - I don’t find myself doing ‘artistic’ edits on my own pictures, but I often get interesting ideas with the play raw images here.
Here’s my go… took me a few goes to get anywhere near what I think is starting to make sense. Thanks for sharing, great shot… tricky to process I found.
Hello, here is my edit. Thank you for this photo — it’s really not easy. Here is an attempt using the tone equalizer to recover details. The trick is to use two stacked instances of the tone equalizer: the first one pulls down the highlights to recover the details while carefully tuning the guided mask, and the second one restores local contrast in those recovered areas.
