This was my first time trying masks and my most in-depth edit so far. Would love to see some more experienced takes on it - my goals were (1) to bring up the exposure on the bird while leaving the sky feeling like twilight and (2) to make the eyes pop a little more, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t find the best way to achieve either. One particular problem I have is that the horns are kind of getting lost (especially the left one).
Great image. I didn’t crop because I felt like having the bird in all the open space was great composition. As the bird is obviously backlit, I left it shadowy.
I tried a brushed exposure mask on just the eyes, but it only applied to one…but then when I starting tweaking the exposure and contrast (global) only the one side of the owl lightened anyways…so happy little accident.
Otherwise I just tried to keep the it as it imported with some colour balance adjustments, a crop, tone eq adjustments, contrast eq, and the default scene referred denoise, sharpening , and all the other standard tweaks.
A question about .xmp files after processing…my storage situation is a mess, so would I find my xmp in the folder I exported it to after editing, or does it save to the original path (in my case, “Downloads”)? 2024_08_12_0457.ARW.xmp (17.5 KB)
Welcome to the forum and great capture. I used a DT feature that I suspect most users have never tried or have forgotten about. The feature is base curve fusion. You turn off filmic and sigmoid and activate the base curve module and there is a fusion option which I have applied to this image. This fusion option can be great for birds against the sky shots.
I think there are some tweaks to that recently so you really need to have it on in preview before exporting to know the results as it seems lately there is a stronger difference in the two settings. If you look at my owl edit on normal preview there is a considerable halo that mostly if not all goes away with HQR…
