{"id":22199,"date":"2014-02-19T05:59:28","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T12:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=22199"},"modified":"2014-02-19T05:59:28","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T12:59:28","slug":"red-tailed-hawk-in-bright-but-diffuse-light-how-to-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/19\/red-tailed-hawk-in-bright-but-diffuse-light-how-to-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Red-tailed Hawk In Bright But Diffuse Light – How To Process?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Processing images taken in light like this can be a balancing act.<\/p>\n

Like many nature photographers I prefer to shoot in direct, warm light.\u00a0 This usually means the sun is low on the horizon and not blocked by clouds.\u00a0 Direct light provides fine, detailed shadows and relatively intense colors in the subject that tend to look natural and pleasing to the eye.<\/p>\n

However, light under relatively thin cloud cover can still be bright.\u00a0 Throw in the reflective qualities of snow on the ground and you have light bouncing around in every conceivable direction which effectively eliminates fine shadow detail\u00a0and\u00a0can even mute\u00a0colors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, 500 f\/4, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This image was taken just over a month ago in such conditions (you can see from my camera settings that I had plenty of light).\u00a0 Clouds were thin, the sun was high (12:24 pm) and there was fresh snow on the ground – conditions that effectively eliminate shadow detail and can\u00a0mute colors.\u00a0 When I processed the image using my normal work-flow (crop, minor exposure adjustment, selective sharpening) I was less than pleased with the\u00a0colors and contrast in the hawk, especially with similar tones behind the bird.<\/p>\n

Normally I don’t even touch saturation or contrast when processing an image but in conditions like this I sometimes make an exception and selectively increase both saturation and contrast to the bird by a small amount (+5 to 7 on each slider) and when I did I liked the results better.\u00a0 One must be careful not to overdo it.\u00a0 In my opinion more nature photographs are ruined by excessive use of saturation and contrast than by\u00a0any other errant processing task.\u00a0\u00a0Many photographers want\u00a0their subject to “pop” out of the image (I dislike that term) but all too often because of colors that look unnatural it “explodes” instead.\u00a0 Even here I may have increased the reds of the tail too much for some tastes but they look pretty good to my eye.<\/p>\n

I’m no processing guru and I’m not saying I’m right about this and those who do it differently are wrong .\u00a0 This is just the way I<\/em> do it…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Processing images taken in light like this can be a balancing act.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,334,450],"tags":[452,1693,1879,1032,1092,451,1692,286,1878],"class_list":["post-22199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-contrast","tag-oversaturation","tag-photoshop","tag-processing","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-saturation","tag-snow","tag-work-flow"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/red-tailed-hawk-9466-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-5M3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}