Long tailed tit

[ChrisD]

Warming up in the morning sunshine. A little lethargic so I managed to get reasonably close.

 

[JamesT]

Good captures, but at least to my way of thinking rather dark. How would they look if pushed a stop or so?

[ChrisD]

Blown out highlights I'm afraid James. Bad lighting, just had to snap while it was there given how close I was (250mm lens).

[johntwo]

19 minutes ago, ChrisD said:

Blown out highlights I'm afraid James. Bad lighting, just had to snap while it was there given how close I was (250mm lens).

If you have Photoshop, the Shadows/Highlights tool will sort it for you otherwise a curves tool will do the same with a bit more fiddling.  I would be worth a try.  The second shot in particular is a nice image and Long Tailed Tits are not that easy to capture.

[ChrisD]

Played with the curves some and squeezed a bit more out it, noise is starting to show in the blacks though. Better?

[johntwo]

Yes.  I think that you could even squeeze a bit more.  You ok if I try?

[ChrisD]

Feel free John, just tell me what you did if it works.

[johntwo]

There you go.  I would normally use the Highlight and Shadows Tool in Photoshop but Here I've used curves.

Pin the highlight and mid tone end of he curves tool, then lift the shadows.  Reverse the process and pin the shadows and mid tones then pull back the highlight to recover some feather detail in the breast feathers..  Better if you can do the latter after selecting the breast area but I don't know what software you are using.  I have then gone on to selectively noise reduced the darker areas (which weren't all that bad) and boosted the saturation just a little to bring out that pink streak on the shoulder.  Finally, I've enhanced the highlight in the eye.  See what you think.

 

[ChrisD]

That looks noisy to me John, and the blacks on the bird's back have a purple cast. To my eye I prefer the original, lighting isn't good but it reflects the conditions under which it was taken.

[Korky]

I don't see subtleties of colour like normal folk - I have definite colour vision problems - so please take that into consideration when I say that I think John's edit makes the image look much better.

Was it the RAW file that was twiddled or the uploaded JPG?

Korky

[johntwo]

The uploaded JPG Korky.

[ChrisD]

I was curious if my monitor had an issue (Acer 27", sRGB profile), but got a very similar result from my older Samsung 22". A younger set of eyeballs on a different PC said the edited version looked odd. Not sure what conclusion to draw here but I see this group of birds regularly at dawn, hopefully I'll get a another chance with the sun behind me sometime soon.