Eastern Wild Turkey

[redrew]

Canon 50D, Canon 600mm + 1.4x, 1/320 @ 5.6

[FrankMi]

A very nice capture Rollin! I feel it could benefit from a bit more separation from the background and perhaps some Local Contrast Enhancement on just the subject.

If you don't mind perhaps I would give it a go to see if we could get the turkey to 'Pop' so to speak....

[redrew]

Thank you Frank, I know the BG is too busy and I made an attempt with layers but the Turkey is back lighted and when the BG is toned down it does not look natural to my eye. These birds are magnificent when properly lighted in front but unfortunately I had to shoot into the morning light and did not have my Better Beamer connected when this guy started strutting his stuff.

By all means have a go at it, that is one of the many reasons I am so enjoying posting images in Cambridge in Colour.

[FrankMi]

I opened the image in ACR and noticed that some of the highlights had blown out so I applied about 80 in Recovery. The rest of the histogram looked well distributed so I then opened the image in Photoshop CS5.

As I wanted to apply two treatments, one to the subject and a different treatment to the background, the first thing to do is to create a layer mask.

For the Turkey I first tried an LCE of 20% and 50 pixels in the Unsharp Mask. https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tu...nhancement.htm

It was better but I decided to also try using Willie Bau’s High Contrast and Detail Effect using dodge and burn technique.

I decided that I liked the High Contrast using Dodge and Burn better so I moved on to the background layer. Here I added an Adjustment Layer for Contrast and Brightness and reduced the contrast to -50. To soften the background behind the turkey I added a Gradient to the Adjustment Layer’s mask so that I could retain the original Contrast at the bottom of the image and fade to the -50 level at the top of the image.

The Gradient served another purpose. I applied a Lens Blur with a radius of 5 pixels to the background and like the contrast it starts with no lens blur at the bottom of the background and gradually increases as you approach the top of the background. To complete the image I would likely crop some off the right side and go for a 1:1 ratio (square crop) to get more space in front of the Turkey than behind it.



As you look at the Layers in this image, you can see the original image at the bottom and moving up we see the mask that was created next. Above that we have the working copy of the image then the LCE test, then the Overlay Layer used for the Dodge & Burn and above that we see the final Dodge & Burn image of just the Turkey.

Above the Turkey layers we have background layer and above it the Gradient layer that applies just to the background.

Starting from the top, the Layer Visibility eyeball icons show us that we are seeing the background gradient layer applied to the background and the black turkey shaped ‘hole’ in the mask indicates that we can see the turkey in the layer below through the hole.

Only the first three layers are used in this case and the LCE layer is disabled. To switch to the LCE view we would only need to disable the Dodge & Burn eyeball and enable the LCE eyeball.

[redrew]

Frank that is just amazing, you improved the Turkey's resolution substantially. I don't have your knowledge and skill of Photoshop but it demonstrates that one can improve an otherwise mediocre image in Photoshop. Thanks

Best wishes

Rollin E. Drew