Fun with Grizzlies

[NorthernFocus]

I think the crop works either way, Christina. Both nice. Sometimes you just need to try different things to see what works. I'm often surprised how much difference different formats can make. Steve's colors really look good too.

You've got a pretty cool place to go shoot the bears. It looks like if you pick your spots you can get some very natural looking settings. That's nice to have access to.

[Brownbear]

Nick,

Thank you for advising. Truly appreciated. Later today I will try the edits. These were photographed on a sunny morning with beautiful clouds. The best shot (1st posted image) with the softer lighting was taken from a different position and perhaps a cloud was overhead. I removed the last image (snow play) which I will revisit and share on another day.

Dan...

As always thank you for your help. Truly appreciated. I'm learning that part of my post processing challenging is the need to have a stronger vision.

Yes, indeed. On a forested mountain top but we would all rather be in Alaska. They are going to introduce salmon the the stream/wee river that runs through the acreage this fall so perhaps I will manage a bear with a fish shot.

Thank you to both!

[FrankMi]

Hi Christina. I love your series of bear shots. Most folks like me wouldn't want to risk getting that close, particularly to a grizzly!

[FrankMi]

Opposite of red is cyan
Opposite of green is magenta
Opposite of blue is yellow

How can I tell what it needs.................the histograms.

Very interesting Steve. This is like black magic to me. Can you elaborate on how you use the Histogram to determine what needs to be changed and by how much?

[Brownbear]

Thank you Frank. These are photographed at a grizzly bear refuge.

Hi Christina. I love your series of bear shots. Most folks like me wouldn't want to risk getting that close, particularly to a grizzly!

[ajohnw]

I wondered if more could be made of the wink. Also wondered about a certain flatness. Downloaded and then found it crisps up and restores the open eye a bit more when converted from aRGB to sRGB.

Not sure about the eye but there may be some mileage in that area. I should have adjusted the mid tones via levels slightly but apart from the eye and convert to sRGB left as is. There is a lot of good black gradation in the shot as well so lifting them by 5-6 bits or so might make them more apparent on a monitor.



It was interesting to see the gaps in the sRGB histogram after converting. I know they will be there and suppose some may be down to PP.

John
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[Nicks Pics]

Photographing bears in a refuge is fun. Many of my wildlife shots were out my window Works pretty well, especially when there's bird seed out there!

Maybe not as many of those wildlife shots the pro's get are in the wild as it appears. I'd be curious to know?

[Brownbear]

Here is my try following Steve's guidelines. Not quite there. It's the first time I've tried adjusting these colours (cyan, magneta) and I suppose as I gain more experience in this type of post processing I will see improvement. I increased the contrast and saturation, added a border in Photoshop (also a first), and the letters using Picasa but for some reason they don't show up in the image posted here.



Thank you Steve. Truly appreciated.

[Brownbear]

Photographing bears in a refuge is fun. Many of my wildlife shots were out my window Works pretty well, especially when there's bird seed out there!

Maybe not as many of those wildlife shots the pro's get are in the wild as it appears. I'd be curious to know?

Hi Nick,

Yes, it is fun and for me a wonderful opportunity to photograph bears, and practice my photography skills. I have yet to see or even have an opportunity to view Grizzly in the wild and I certainly couldn't get this close in real life.

Sorry, I don't know the answer to your question but I would expect that the majority of wildlife shots taken by pros are photographed in the wild to capture the natural beauty of the environment, and the natural behaviour of the wildlife being photographed, the beautiful light at dawn or dusk, etc...

PS Outside your window sounds like a wonderful photo-opportunity.

[Brownbear]

Hi John,

Very nice edit. Thank you for sharing. You know their eyes are very small.

I have to ask once more because I know you have advised me before that I'm posting Adobe RGB photos instead of sRGB... I post process my photos in LR in ACR, and the colour space there states sRGB... Then I open the image in Adobe Photoshop where I apply an unsharp mask, and perhaps a selective curves adjustment, and in this case a selective colour adjustment. Where the image data also shows sRGB as the colour space.

My photos are saved in Windows on my hard drive but I view, email and upload my photos from Picasa simply because I like how I can view all of my images in Picasa. I don't process anything in Picasa, so the only thing I can think of that might cause the change in the colour space is Picasa doing something automatically? Is it possible that you are seeing my images as Adobe RGB when they really are and should be for presenting on the internet sRGB?

Thank you in advance.

I wondered if more could be made of the wink. Also wondered about a certain flatness. Downloaded and then found it crisps up and restores the open eye a bit more when converted from aRGB to sRGB.

Not sure about the eye but there may be some mileage in that area. I should have adjusted the mid tones via levels slightly but apart from the eye and convert to sRGB left as is. There is a lot of good black gradation in the shot as well so lifting them by 5-6 bits or so might make them more apparent on a monitor.



It was interesting to see the gaps in the sRGB histogram after converting. I know they will be there and suppose some may be down to PP.

John
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[Downrigger]

How do you know just by looking at an image that it needs a little cyan.

To me, Christina, it's just a matter of knowing to look for it... as you probably have already learned to do for color temp when editing in LR. Once you see it a few times, you can notice it when you look for it. And, like color temp, you can miss the need for correction if you're not paying attention.

Your bear is wonderful, but between the wink and the lollygag tongue I'm wondering if he's gotten into the sauce!

[Brownbear]

Hi Mark,

I could definitely see the green cast but I think this the first time I've noticed a colour cast without someone point it out to me. Yes, I will learn to look for it, just like WB.

Thank you. The bear was eating something in the grass and had his/her head down most of the time. Perhaps insects. Tasty critters.

To me, Christina, it's just a matter of knowing to look for it... as you probably have already learned to do for color temp when editing in LR. Once you see it a few times, you can notice it when you look for it. And, like color temp, you can miss the need for correction if you're not paying attention.

Your bear is wonderful, but between the wink and the lollygag tongue I'm wondering if he's gotten into the sauce!

[ajohnw]

Hi John,

Very nice edit. Thank you for sharing. You know their eyes are very small.

I have to ask once more because I know you have advised me before that I'm posting Adobe RGB photos instead of sRGB... I post process my photos in LR in ACR, and the colour space there states sRGB... Then I open the image in Adobe Photoshop where I apply an unsharp mask, and perhaps a selective curves adjustment, and in this case a selective colour adjustment. Where the image data also shows sRGB as the colour space.

My photos are saved in Windows on my hard drive but I view, email and upload my photos from Picasa simply because I like how I can view all of my images in Picasa. I don't process anything in Picasa, so the only thing I can think of that might cause the change in the colour space is Picasa doing something automatically? Is it possible that you are seeing my images as Adobe RGB when they really are and should be for presenting on the internet sRGB?

Thank you in advance.

It's odd no one has commented on just how to fix this when using Adobe. Maybe Colin can. I don't use them which makes that difficult. Some one must be conversant with this area.

The area partly cropped up in another post where some one who probably uses Adobe pointed out that 2 monitor profiles are really needed to use both aRGB and sRGB. Workspace settings also cropped up which isn't the same thing as the display profiles. I found this link to confirm the workspace aspect

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/pa...hoto-rgb.shtml

Maybe you have calibrated your monitor to aRGB so software defaults to this. I'm not at all sure because several mixes are possible as the raw file works it's way onto the screen. I believe it's possible to mix all sorts of things up including installing the wrong profile for the screen the shot was processed with.

Having said this people must be able to display, aRGB, sRGB and others so there must be a setting some where for changing these and all relate to the monitor and the PP package. It might be a system rather than an Adobe thing. If I wanted to use aRGB I would have to change it at the system level and then tell the packages to use it - I think as I don't use aRGB at all and only have an sRGB monitor.

Have to say that the difference in this shot is slight. Might even be imagining it. That's not always the case with shots from others though.

All I can add is that I mostly use 3 packages, The maintainer of one just wont add aRGB for editing but will cope with paper profiles for proofing. The GIMP is the one that tells me what the profile is. It offers me choice of keeping or converting. I don't think that converting with sRGB input does anything as it will use my system profile anyway. The other Rawtherapee which I assume is the same as Adobe has a workspace setting which should be set to ProPhoto and an output profile settings. There are a lot of those. I understand it can cope with deep colour medium format. I leave that set to RT_sRGB which is essentially IEC61966. If I used aRGB as I understand it I would have to set that here and change the system monitor profile.

John
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[Brownbear]

Thank you John. Truly appreciated.

I've double checked this before and I thought I finally had everything set correctly, and will do so again. Perhaps I missed the setting for the calibration of my monitor.

I will figure it out, and hopefully the next image I post will be sRGB. Thank you for the link.

[Rita]

Bears are wonderful creatures as are your pics of them

[ajohnw]

I had another play around with the shot as I know Christina wont mind. It was the goofy expression comment and I wondered if I could turn it into a BEAR. Also try detail level based sharpening and one or two other things. The result. Not sure maybe over done. I burnt the tongue a little too much on purpose.



Also tried getting rid of the grass across the face. No luck so far using something intended to remove power lines etc. I'm wondering about cut from the other side, flip and blend.

John
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[Brownbear]

Yes, indeed! Thank you.

Bears are wonderful creatures as are your pics of them

[ajohnw]

Hi John,

Thank you for demonstrating another edit. I don't mind at all because this is a learning forum I think it is nice for others to see different versions of images and learn different ways of post processing. (including me)

It is a nice edit, a little contrasty and dark for my personal preferences but I do like it, except for the tongue (overdone!)
I'm actually very fond of the grass across the face in this particular shot. As to turning my cute bear into a ferocious bear well he/she is still cute... You certainly made the flies in the ear stand out.

You seem to be very fond of post processing so I am going to send you a raw image to tackle if you feel like it. It is an adorable image that I am about to trash because it has several issues including a green cast, too strong highlights/glare (possibly from the fence) on the front paw and right hand side of the bear, and blurry leaves on portions of the bear that I have tried to clone out. I can manage the blurry fly but not the leaves or the grass.

Here is my best attempt. In trying to fix the colour cast I believe I made the image too red.



Aside.... This colour balance tool is new to me, and I see that even the slightest adjustment to the colour, ie; adding cyan or magenta makes very tall skinny spikes in the histogram which can't be a good thing for image quality?

Looking at the shot you posted it looks to me like you have managed to get green reflected light off the grass on part of the bears head. Something similar cropped up on reflections from people clothes onto their skin. I did try to do something on that and failed but that was some time ago. If I remember correctly, sports shot and yellow tops. It was considered an impossible problem to correct. I've had another thought since then so could give that a try.

On the sliders I feel the general idea is to look at the histogram and align the major areas of colour not that this will always work but it can be an indication. It's a bit like doing the same thing with levels by adjusting each of the rgb inputs so that they have the same span in the output which usually means moving the bright end. That works perfectly on some shots and even accounts for some camera variation but is more sensitive to adjust.

LOL I shouldn't have done anything to the flies as I intended to only work on the main facial area. Must have missed them with the eraser.

John
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[Brownbear]

Hi John,

Thank you. It is enough for me to know that that is an impossible edit, and good to know for future. I will have to learn how to avoid colour casts. I don't want you to waste your time so I've deleted the post and the image. Truly appreciated.

PS The flies add character

Looking at the shot you posted it looks to me like you have managed to get green reflected light off the grass on part of the bears head. Something similar cropped up on reflections from people clothes onto their skin. I did try to do something on that and failed but that was some time ago. If I remember correctly, sports shot and yellow tops. It was considered an impossible problem to correct. I've had another thought since then so could give that a try.

On the sliders I feel the general idea is to look at the histogram and align the major areas of colour not that this will always work but it can be an indication. It's a bit like doing the same thing with levels by adjusting each of the rgb inputs so that they have the same span in the output which usually means moving the bright end. That works perfectly on some shots and even accounts for some camera variation but is more sensitive to adjust.

LOL I shouldn't have done anything to the flies as I intended to only work on the main facial area. Must have missed them with the eraser.

John
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[ajohnw]

You should have kept it!. I've toned in the areas to match other parts that should be a similar colour. I'd say this is a little too light and should be darkened a little.



I tried adding magenta and red but it doesn't work out so selected and shifted the hue. I used After Shot Pro as I suspect that will be similar to Adobe.

This was the layer stack.



Brush 1 roughly selected all of the problem area well out from it. Brush 2 selected some of that in the same way and it looks like a 3rd might help a bit more.

This is one of the adjustments - colour balance section.



On that I suspect you need to notice the gaps in the histogram at each end which is for the underlying image. I'm not used to using After Shot Pro but suspect I could retain more green highlight. As it is I set a - 1EV on exposure and played with the black level to minimise the appearance of noise in the dark fur. Also loosely use it's noise removal. I then corrected the cast before applying contrast. If I knew how to set the feather size on ASP I would have probably brushed the grass out of it's scope. Easy to set the diameter but pass on how the feathering is adjusted. The main adjustment shown is the hue shift. in the colour balance section. It's rather delicate to use. Forget the magenta green, I couldn't zero it. The one above with the red etc square proved to me that hue shift is the best way to do it. If I had switched to HSL I should have been able to dim the area as well but it might be better to handle that aspect locally.

I then switched to a package I am more conversant with to tidy up, reduce and sharpen for the 1st time. Sharpening late helps keep noise down. To tidy up I flattened the brightness range. Not sure how that is done with layers but it literally flattens the luminance histogram. And then applied a brightness ramp which is a bit like using gradient filters but also allows me to locally brighten in an x - y sort of fashion on the image. The one i used looked like this.



I suspect flatten brightness range is a bit like dup. layer, desat and invert which will brighten dark areas. When as in this one the bright end is low it may be the same thing without the invert. Think I am going to have to ask the person that wrote the package.

John
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