Conrad Tan wrote:
I still have some snowy egret shots from yesterday that are so blown out that I could not recover any detail from them. I don\'t know what is more difficult, recovering the detail from a snowy or a blackbird!
Well, as long as you remember to:
(1) Start by exposing the bird right. To do that, use the spot or partial metering options, depending on the bird size in the viewfinder.
(2) Avoid stark contrast bird-background.
(3) Do not push levels too hard in photoshop. Once you attempt to fix major exposure problems, some funky colours and noise start to emerge, and the whole thing doesn\'t look plausible any more.
(4) Remember that the ambient light sometimes simply doesn\'t bring out feather detail or, more specifically, irredescence on a Hummer, Grackle, Starling etc. No photoshop action can create it from nothing.
Take this Cormorant as an example. Taken with the 400 f/5.6 today. There was a fairly strong sunlight coming from above, and I was looking into it, resulting in the bird\'s underside and its left flank being black. That\'s a kind of reality of what I saw. Any \"recovery\" in photoshop wouldn\'t work well, although one can perhaps try to fake it in a small web size image. Next time the light will hopefully be better, or one can bring a better beamer with them, if one believes in its use. I don\'t.
Apr 13, 2009 at 07:52 PM
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