I am having a rough time processing photos with dark brown in them. Driving me a little nuts! I thought it was an exposure setting on my camera, but even with spot sensor I still have them underexposed and when using the shadow slider in Lightroom, I lose color. This photo of an Osprey shows what I mean. Taken with a Nikon D610 and Tamron 150-600, 420mm. 1/2500 sec, f/8, iso 1600. I am just not getting the detail in the feathers.
Also attached is a shot of a Great Blue Heron shot with the same equipment.
TIA
Hi Larry,
The osprey photo looks like it is a significant crop. With significant crops, any subtle problem becomes magnified and you lose sharpness and detail with large crops. That is the number one reason why there’s not a lot of feather detail recorded. This type of exposure is difficult to pull off as your meter is going to underexpose the image if you are using an Auto mode without exposure compensation. You need to use some significant exposure compensation (+1.3 to 2.0) to be able to generate enough data in the shadows to reduce the digital noise. The heron image is a scene that has much more midtones in it and your meter gave an exposure value a lot closer to the ideal exposure. For the heron image, the throat and chin of the bird have some blown highlights as presented. For this type of image, I would start with the flat or neutral camera profile and bring up the highlights and adjust the shadow slider down in Lightroom until you have some nice light and dark tones with adequate details. Try to photograph birds using manual exposure settings. Pick a midtone area in a scene that you are currently actively shooting and set your exposure and aperture so the meter registers a midtone value. Take a test shot and examine the histogram. Look for clipping in shadows and highlights. Look at my snowy owl photo–I first set my exposure to safely record midtones correctly. I took a test shot and felt that the exposure was darker than ideal. So, I increased the length of the exposure and was able to capture some pretty good detail with minimal noise in both shadows and highlights. Read up on ETTR (Expose To The Right) and this link has a fairly reasonable explanation about ETTR https://digital-photography-school.com/exposing-to-the-right/ . The histograms reveal the recorded data for all tones captured in the scene. Pushing the exposure to the right enables the camera to capture detail in shadows while conserving highlight details too. Keep posting–you have a knack for capturing some nice poses with your bird shots and practice makes perfect…Jim
Thanks for the detailed feedback Jim. I have suspected I need to be pushing the histogram to the right. I do shoot in manual all the time now, with auto ISO. The brown tones just keep giving me fits. lol This is a big crop as the bird was a significant distance away. I could have slowed the shutter speed down quite a bit which I think would have helped. I will read that article, thank you. Here is an image where the detail is much clearer, but the bird was also much closer. Close is everything if you can get it.
You may want to set ISO manually. Auto-Iso adds some additional complexity to the equation. When lighting is far from ideal, we as photographers have to be creative with our cameras and choose settings that provide us with the highest probability of getting an ideal image. Also visit Arthur Morris’s Birds as Art blog–lots of reading and good info for the bird photoigrapher. His detailed treatment of birds is based on getting the best exposure for the shot…Jim
I read the article and decided to give ETTR a try today. I’m pretty happy with the results. It’s tough to move E to the right and not blow out the whites, but I do feel the detail is better. Here is one of my best shots from today. 1/500, 6.3, iso 3200.
I appreciate the help.
Another suggestion is to play with the saturation and luminance sliders in the hsl tab of Lightroom.
Simple but effective. And if your familiar with luminosity masks, a midtones 2 with a levels adjustment layer will pull back some contrast and you can increase the brightness with that method as well.
