Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Getting ready for a trip to Malheur at the end of the month. I found this shot from last year. Used masking in LR to darken the background and Topaz AI to sharpen the bird. It looks too artificial or overly sharpened for my taste. Any thoughts?
ISO 400
f6.3
1/1600 sec
Nikon d500
Sigma 150-600 (600) contemporary
Looks like it has the potential to be a nice shot, with nice lighting and a lovely pose. For my tastes, it could use a bit more room for the virtual feet, which probably wouldn’t be difficult to engineer.
But on close look, it’s oversharpened to the extent of looking like one of those so-called “artistic” filters. It may have been too smoothed out by NR before the sharpening, which made sharpening even harder. Sharpening is much more difficult and fraught with pitfalls than NR. But as a poster-type illustration, this has some nice features.
Hi Daniel,
Nice pose and I’m fine with the cropping.
I agree with you and Diane about sharpening - it’s overdone. Have you tried a workflow excluding Topaz that just uses Smart sharpen in Photoshop? I often start at (Amount: 100%, Radius: 0.7, Reduce Noise 0%, Remove: Gaussian Blur). I’ll often start at these settings and perhaps increase the radius if it needs stronger sharpening.
Thank you. I can tell this group will put me on a path to better photography.
I agree with the comments by @Diane_Miller @Allen_Sparks (and yours) about the sharpening. It looks like one of the illustration modes on a Sony. Hope you have an opportunity to repeat this shot on your upcoming trek.
Beautiful pose and I like your artistic vision in this one, Dan. Aside from the Noise reductions/sharpening issue (and there are as many approaches to that as there are photographers I think), I find the blue tones in the Egret a bit too far for my taste, but that might be personal prejudice since I usually like warmer tones.
One comment on the noise reduction issue. the whites in an image usually will have less noise than the shadows just due to the way an image is taken. In this case, masking out the egret and just doing noise reduction on the background might have been the way to go.
I’d bet you can go back to the raw file and get a more realistic image – certainly worth a try. And @Dennis_Plank has a good point about the blues/cyans. If you rework, see if you can subdue the blown areas of the whites a little. Don’t try to sharpen; just see what you can do with what you got in that regard. Sometimes it can be an amazing difference, but the percentages are low.
Daniel, from a purely artistic perspective, this is very cool. If you’re looking for more realism then what the others have said are very good suggestions.
I will be in Malheur starting April 30 for a week. Can’t wait. It’s my first visit there.
Cheers,
David
Thanks - I hope you enjoy your trip to Malheur. Hopefully there will be a lot of water this year. If you have time - head south into the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge/Steens Mountain area for a drive through. It should be beautiful.
My thoughts were similar to David Bostock’s. Very artistic with a great pose and the image works well with the background. Maybe you could post the raw image, so the folks here could play around with different sharpening techniques.
