I was at Blashford Lakes nature reserve (Hampshire UK), walked into a hide, sat down, and within seconds this chap appeared about 5 metres in front. Up goes the camera, grabbed a short burst. Then someone shouts KINGFISHER and frightened it off. Thanks for that, and expletive deleted. Strong sun coming from the right so lighting was far from ideal, and I didn’t have time to mess about with exposure compensation and other settings.
Here’s my sorry effort in darktable, trying to dredge detail and colour out of shadows (something I’m not good at). I’m sure others can do much better.
Set exposure based on the middle tone of what you are going for. In this case, I kept an eye on the orange on the bird’s chest and ignored clipping the highlights.
Turn on noise reduction with the denoise (profiled) module. (As your camera is profiled, it mainly does the right thing just by turning it on. You can adjust it, but it’s usually pretty good by default.)
Then, go to filmic rgb and click the eydropper(s). I clicked the bottom one in the module which sets both light and dark. For some photos, you’d just have to click the first one. On a typical sunny day with a good exposure, sometimes you don’t even need to adjust anything in filmic rgb.
That’s it for this base edit!
After this, I’d then usually go to color balance rgb and select a color profile from its menu to boost the colors a bit and then start playing with tone equalizer. And I’d mess with the presets in “diffuse or sharpen” — the lens deblur ones are really nice for bringing out the details in a photo (replacing “sharpening”, effectively doing the same thing but in a different way).
Super short version: Adjust exposure for the middle parts, then adjust the bright and dark parts in filmic rgb.
This photo is quite underexposed by default, but that’s fine as Fuji cameras are ISO invariant, meaning that underexposing and cranking up the ISO are basically the same thing for raw files. The most important tip is to try to not overexpose (“blow out”) the highlights — which, thankfully, you preserved here (you can see detail in the bright part of the branch! excellent!).
Getting a good exposure at a low ISO is great, so you can try to get the most signal with the least noise. But when you do underexpose, it’s the same as cranking up the ISO… basically meaning that you’ll have more noise. (Thankfully darktable makes managing that noise pretty easy now.)
Great picture, Kingfishers are always so shy and hard to get. There’s a couple of them near the river here but am still trying to get a decent shot of them.
Thanks for sharing. I think your original edit is pretty good, except the noise reduction is really heavy handed. The whole thing looks like wax to me when viewing at full size. If you tried to pull more detail out of the shadows, the picture would look worse, because you’d kill all the contrast in the process. Software is no substitute for good lighting, in other words. Here is mine.
Edit: actually I don’t think it’s noise reduction causing the waxy effect, or at least not just noise reduction. I played with your xmp in darktable and couldn’t quite isolate what is causing it. Maybe a combination of things. I posted a downsized image, but here is a 100% crop from ART for comparison:
I think the tree branch needs masked to avoid some changes that work maybe nicely on the bird… in most edits including my own its other worldly and is a distraction … I might see what I can come up with to demonstrate when I have…time…
Thanks for sharing the picture. It was very challenging to work with. I feel I should be able to do more with this image, but it would require experimentation. I tried using two instances of shadow and highlights plus tone equalizer to brighten the shadows. I also did some brightening in the color balance rgb module. Noise is a challenge after brightening the shadows. I used denoise (profile), RAW denoise and Astro denoise modules.
When taking pictures I like to shoot with auto exposure bracketing set at +/- 1 EV. It often saves the day when having to shoot at a moments notice.
BTW, your edit was very good for such a challenging shot. Well done. Everyone’s edits here are very good.
Here’s my attempt. I’ve always had trouble getting decent photos of Kingfishers. They’re shy and don’t like to get too close, plus they like to hang out in harsh sunlight. But they’re incredible to look at if you happen to get a good shot.
I didn’t do to much with the shadows, because I figured that’s how the bird looked when the photo was taken.
