The smoke from the fires out west has hit us and makes for some interesting light in the late afternoon. One of the resident female ruby throats visited and she looked so unusually golden in the light that I prayed to the universe I got at least one shot of her and here she is.
Specific Feedback Requested
Which version do you prefer? You’ll have to look at some details maybe to see a difference, but I’m curious as to reactions.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Handheld
Lr processed for initial exposure, white & black points, texture & a crop. Then into some Topaz products. The first was Sharpen only on Very Noisy and I think…motion blur. The second went through DeNoise then Sharpen but on regular noise. Both Auto. Then into Ps for a little distraction removal and I had to clone stamp the edges of the bird in one of them because the noise reduction didn’t come as close as it could have - really only a few pixels worth, but I noticed.
I’m afraid my eyes aren’t good enough to detect any differences, Kris. A lovely image in any case. The only possible nit I have is that the white at the top of the neck seems to be lacking detail. However it’s a pretty small area and viewed from a respectful distance, wouldn’t be noticed.
One is with Topaz Sharpen only and the other is with DeNoise and Sharpen. There is a subtle difference, but obviously not as much of one as I thought. You know how it is when you work a photo and then can’t really ‘see’ it after a while or you obsess over a tiny detail that no one else will notice? Yeah…
This is a very nice pose on the hummer. You ended up having to fight with the issues of ISO 4000 and the image suffered a bit from that, but still not that bad. I could not tell the difference between the two. I think the image has a yellow color cast globally. I worked it a bit is PS with a color balance adjustment layer, and then also did an ACR filter to remove more noise from the background only. Here’s the result.
