You might want to convert this photo to black-and-white. It's almost there already, but the reddish color in the upper section of the picture draws my eye strongly away from the swan.
I adore the pastel colors of the original version. It's a lovely image. I would suggest sharpening it a little would improve it. You might also try bumping the saturation, perhaps a lot, to emphasize the pastels. A monochrome rendition is good, but for me for this image it costs the charm of the pastels that so well sets the mood and time of day.
The exposure on the swan is good and so is the focus.
For me the swan needs space in front of it to swim into, should be bigger in frame and would be way better with landscape orientation.
The b/w does improve it because the water is overexposed and b/w hides that. But I am not fond of the oversaturated version because it does not look real.
Geese are tough because of the white color and contrast, so good job. Scott
I would suggest less saturation and sharpening - enough to bump the pastels without looking artificial. A starting example to try could be +40 saturation and an USM of 60%, radius 2 pixels and a threshold of about 5.
@aunti I played with that, i'll have to isolate the swan from the enhancement though, as you see on bob's version the swan's colours become strange.
@bob, no problem faffing with my images! feel free, it's great to see what's possible. I think this time you overcooked it though, those shades aren't pastel!
@scott the intent(but not result) was to show the ice in the lake(top texture) hence the portrait orientation, but i liked the out of the camera version a lot so I threw it up here.
And it's still a Swan, albeit a juvenile.
I like your swan but I though it was de-emphasized because of the overexposed water. Here's my go at it:
1) IN camera raw dialogue: added a graduated filter top-down to remove some of the over-exposure. Cropped to bottom two-thirds of your photo because of distracting diagonal ripple at the top of the water (and to try to bring focus back to the subject). Reduced the aqua/blue/purples in the water color (HSL dialogue).
2) With image open in photoshop: created a new layer from the image, selected the swan with the magic selector wand. Opened levels and just brought the white-point to the left to meet the edge of the data in the histogram (this brought some white back into the bird).
3) Added some light behind the bird to set it off of the background a little more.
Hope you'll like the results. If you have the raw file you'll be able to do a much better job than me tweaking in camera raw.
No problem silvawispa - glad you didn't hate it. I had rather a lot of fun going through images in this section last night. Post us another sometime (possibly your own PP of this?).
With a good image there are many ways to make excellent variations. For me it's one of the most entertaining and satisfying aspects of photography - rediscovery.
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