A couple of photos of a Martial Eagle, shot in Tsavo West National Park, Kenya half an hour before sunset last November.
The warm evening sunlight was raking across the road making it difficult to choose a good exposure level. Anyway the first photo with wings spread shows the eagle’s white belly nicely. This bird is a juvenile, and has not yet developed all the breast spots that are very distinctive on the adult.
For the other photo (taken seconds later) the bird folded its wings and turned a little into the sunlight. Suddenly I have this yellow wash over the bird’s breast and belly. Having checked online, there should not be any yellow on this eagle. I guess it could be a mutation, but more likely something introduced by the photo process.
Two questions - what sort of thing is causing the yellowness, and how to get a more natural white without getting an unnatural blue sky? I’ve tried playing with color calibration temperature, color balance saturation, but not found a good image yet.
By the way the large whitish bulge on high on the chest is the bird’s craw - it had just had a good meal on a small deer which was why it was sitting there posing so patiently beside the roadER6_2681.dng (17.9 MB) ER6_2681.dng.xmp (7.7 KB)
Photos were shot with Canon EOSR6 which saves RAW in a new CR3 format. Sorry Aurelien I had no choice but to convert to DNG - and maybe that is the issue? ER6_2683.dng (21.9 MB) ER6_2683.dng.xmp (7.0 KB)
Hopefully its not just my uncalibrated monitor
I am happy for anyone to download and use these two images for any non-commercial purpose.
People may be able to help you more if you share a sidecar with your editing history. You may want to post in the Play Raw category (https://discuss.pixls.us/c/processing/playraw/30). A permissive licence, allowing people to download and edit your image, and share the result here, will also be needed.
For apples-to-apples comparing, I matched the white balances, 1.966,1.0, 1.520 from the first image. After that still had the yellow wash. What it looks like to me is those areas are illuminated by reflected sunlight, but I can’t pinpoint the source.
Interesting point. The most likely source of reflected light would be the sandy soil which is an intense red, and there is little ground cover so there is a lot of red soil to reflect from . .
I’ve noticed such shifts in scenes with sunrise or sunset lighting. The light from the sun is already attenuated in various parts of the spectrum by the atmosphere, and reflecting it off different surfaces changes it further. I chalk it up to the interesting-ness of the scene…
For the bird just use the color calibration and draw a box on the chest. This should knock out a lot of the yellow. It may be too much so now whatever DT settles on instead select custom. That won’t change things initially but it will give you a chroma and hue slider. If you pull the chroma all the way to zero it essentially zero the impact of the module now slowly add it back until you like the look. In addition some tweaking the color and brightness tabs can modify nicely the blue sky for more or less blue…
Yes that looks good Todd, but its really the second image that is giving all the trouble. It might be nice to get a second instance of color calibration and light the shadows on the bird with something appropriate to light reflected off a red sand surface.
The previous image posted above I used color calibration and a few other modules…I actually looked at just adding the CB module. I find that the area autopicker (hue) for highlights often does a nice job on color cast. I selected an area on the right leg of the bird. It does a pretty good job on the yellow but you get a deeper blue in the sky which is easy to fix. If the module is too strong you can also decrease the saturation of the selected hue in the highlights in CB module or add more if needed. So that is the first image so 2 clicks and one module
. The second I used added the brightness slider as well in color calibration on the blue to lighten the sky back up (you could go more) You could also pull some of the blue out of it…it would be easy to mask and use a variety of tools to alter it as needed…
There is a good bit of vignette as well that if anything gets enhanced by lightening up the sky a bit. I had to manually select the lens but it seems to have done a nice job on the dark blue corners in the sky…
So in the lighttable view you open your raw and then in the history tab right…choose load sidecar…it defaults to *.xmp so you need to say all files …then choose the jpg as you would an xmp
@Aliks I got your point, I pushed the color slider too far of course in order to highlight the Yellow-ish tone, but I can’t explain the “canary” effect
Looking at other images of martial eagles, I noticed more (juvenile) birds with similar yellowish colours. Could it be light scattered through the feathers of the bird? Iow, perfectly natural and correct… (OK, perhaps not as strong as in @Jean-Marc_Digne’s image). Which means it’s not something @Aliks did wrong, it just is the way the bird looked.
I’ll up load the xmp file…I am use a dev version from yesterday…what version are you using?? Basically as a start try the color balance method I described. Use the highlight hue picker and draw a box on either the wing the belly or the left leg has the strongest yellow so hit that…you will see the effect right away…then you can go from there…or use the color calibration approach I suggested…similar just a couple more steps to get to the hue chroma sliders which you can adjust to remove or tone down the yellow…ER6_2683_05.dng.xmp (5.7 KB) ER6_2683.dng.xmp (12.5 KB) ER6_2683_04.dng.xmp (9.1 KB) ER6_2681.dng.xmp (9.1 KB) ER6_2683_01.dng.xmp (7.5 KB) ER6_2683_02.dng.xmp (12.7 KB) ER6_2683_03.dng.xmp (11.6 KB) I have to dash but here are all the xmp files from some playing around I did today…if you have any quesitons I can try to answer a bit later…have to head off to work…One last thing…DT doesn’t seem to add your lens but I think its in the list you if you go to lens corrections and select it manually from the canon list it makes a strong impact…really lightens the overall image correcting the strong vignette…just in case you have not done this…
That was my first thought , that the juveniles had a creamier colour, but that is not mentioned in any of the field guides. They all say the breast and rump are white.
Where did you see the images? Not all websites vet the images, so its best to rely on the bigger players like Cornell University / Macaulay database, or the birdforum.net Gallery.
I’m thinking that also, now. Taking a closer look at the first image, it appears the bird’s white feathers are soiled a bit. The lit portions go to saturation, which by definition look white, but in the mid-tones there’s definitely a yellowish tint to parts of the feathers. Here’s a screenshot; note particularly the coloration on the leading edge of the wing to the left in the picture. In rawproc, with only tone-lifting, no color manipulation other than the camera->display color transform:
