Blue Heron

[Steve S]

A couple blue herons from this spring. Too damn cold to go shoot, so i guess it's editing for a few days. Still working on my editing workflow with ufraw and gimp.







Comments welcome. What i've been working on is shadow detail , colors, and sharpening.

Both of these images i've added a small percentage of lab color , contrast, and output sharpened with 4 layers of sharpening.(octave sharpening.)

[Geoff F]

I think the only possible alteration that I would consider is to crop away some of the twigs on the left side of the second photo. They are so dense and well focused that I think they detract from the bird.

[Jim B.]

Hi Steve,
Processing looks really good.Going to agree with Geoff on cropping second photo.#1,beautiful.

[bleys]

Love the first, might crop a bit off the top (nitpicking), but the second is too busy. The twigs and branches definitely overpower the heron. It might work if you cropped some of them away and maybe blurred the rest of the branches a bit.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Steve,

That "octave sharpening" regime/system certainly seems to work well, I love the results.

I did a quick google and it seems to be (only?) a GIMP speciality.

Then I made the mistake of trying to watch a quicktime movie about it; lesson #127 I think at meetthegimp.org - it drove me nuts (in FF) it would NOT resize to fit my window, I did an f11 to full size the browser and the blooming thing got stuck like that. Plus it was a video that seemed to consist of images of webpages, so it looked like you could click things, but they didn't do anything Grrrrr

I can't remember when I last got so annoyed with something!!! Needless to say, I won't be going near it with the proverbial barge-pole, ever again.

Shame.

Sorry, back to the pictures; the first is so good, that for me it makes the second a very poor second, mainly due to the mass of twigs conflicting and obstructing the view of the Heron, despite the equally impressive PP.

[Donald]

Then I made the mistake of trying to watch a quicktime movie about it; lesson #127 I think at meetthegimp.org ... I can't remember when I last got so annoyed with something!!! Needless to say, I won't be going near it with the proverbial barge-pole, ever again.

Dave. How could you!!! There are those of us who rely on our weekly podcast from Rolf at meetthegimp and would be totally helpless without it!

[Dave Humphries]

OK, I just looked at the very helpful descriptive text on the home page which explains how it is done.

Rolf is forgiven

[Steve S]

I think the only possible alteration that I would consider is to crop away some of the twigs on the left side of the second photo. They are so dense and well focused that I think they detract from the bird.

Thanks geoff, i was trying to not overcrop...........this one was a little farther out than the first one.

[Steve S]

Hi Steve,
Processing looks really good.Going to agree with Geoff on cropping second photo.#1,beautiful.

Thanks jim, i should have cropped it a little tighter, easy fix.

[Steve S]

Love the first, might crop a bit off the top (nitpicking), but the second is too busy. The twigs and branches definitely overpower the heron. It might work if you cropped some of them away and maybe blurred the rest of the branches a bit.

Maybe i'll erase them from the sharpening mask and then they won't get sharpened.

[Steve S]

OK, I just looked at the very helpful descriptive text on the home page which explains how it is done.

Rolf is forgiven

Hey dave, i do it a little different than what they describe. I make a dup layer.....add a layer mask set to grayscale.....edge detect(choose the edge that works best for the image)....levels to adjust the mask to sharpen the parts i want ....gaussian blur at 5 pix.....set to value mode.....then i dup the layer 3 more times....then start sharpening each layer like they say. When i'm done, i turn off any other edits and leave the sharpening layers on + original layer and hit layer---copy of visible. This will make another layer of just the layers you have turned on(all the sharpening layers together)...now you can adjust the opacity of the sharpening to get the desired amount. No reason you can't do the same thing with photoshop.