Very instructional thread.
Back to the original image:
Excellent capture. Great detail, excellent eye contact. Saturation/sharpness of the eye are working well. BG is busy but doesnt bother me That much. I would clone out the blades of grass crossing into the lighter, tan tones behind as a minor cleanup. If you chose to simplify the BG I agree lens blurring selectively is a good way to go. In terms of degree of blurring, I would opt for an effect somewhere between Ben's first effort and the original. I think the position in the frame is just fine and Kent's crop is a bit too tight on the left for my eyes.
This one has Karens suggestion of using lens blur plus Sadjas of darkening the background. I also use a gradient mask for blur transition and erased some parts for a smoother transition. I also applied Topaz pop to the bird.
This is a nice image, I would love to have one like it. I can imagine what could be done with a raw file.
Thanks for the tutorial. I learned several new things here. For one, I was never able to add selections before, I see how you did it by completing the lasso while holding the shift key, I always tried to do an open ended selection that touched the original, and then the original would go away. But if you complete (close) each new addition, it adds.
I also was unaware of the blur brush, now I have it,
Overall, this is a better way to do it, but I still think I would need a tablet-pen for fine work.
I still ended up with a halo around the bird and had to make a bird mask to preserve detail. I found the quick selection toll did pretty good at selecting the bird in spite of the low contrast.
I used lens blur. I tried a more complex mask job today using your tips. I find I have to have two masks, one of the sharp subject and an inverse. I think I saw you do some sort of selection on the birds head but was not sure what.
I may post my subject with the results if you think it would be worth it. I was able to avoid halos but only by keeping a sharp subject mask for the end and by being very careful on the inverse layer around the transition. I blurred in several stages as I moved away from the subject.
Even so, I have a small white band around the subject. Maybe 2 pixels. I used 0.9 rad for refine edge.
If you used lens blur and still had a halo problem, that's a selection issue. One of the purposes of the video was to show a way to get a clean edge selection in the area of the bird's head, leaving a sharp border without a halo, whilst using a blurred and feathered edge in the junction where the blur added meets existing blur to avoid an obvious line. If watch the refine edge panel in the video, it should show the radius for the head selection as 0.0 pixels, although I suspect the video recording and playback probably blurs it too much to read. The head and neck were selected with zero radius so there would not be a halo. The selection mask was built in parts so the background edge would be soft and feathered and the edge around the bird's head would be sharp and edge effects, especially if more sharpening was added, for example when converting to print large, would sharpen well.
AuntiPode wrote:
If you watch the refine edge panel in the video, it should show the radius for the head selection as 0.0 pixels, although I suspect the video recording and playback probably blurs it too much to read. The head and neck were selected with zero radius so there would not be a halo. The selection mask was built in parts so the background edge would be soft and feathered and the edge around the bird's head would be sharp and edge effects, especially if more sharpening was added, for example when converting to print large, would sharpen well.
Yep, I can get the bird head halo free. The halo is on the blurred layer, when it blurs it carrys part of the bird colors and detail around the bird. If you erase this the erase shows even with a low amount and feathered.
If I first make an inverse mask it works better because there is no bird info to get blurred (hope that makes sense). But it probably attempts to include some of the white area where the bird is missing.
