Fun with Grizzlies

[Brownbear]

Thank you John. I deleted it from this thread and drop box because I gathered it was an impossible edit to do - ie; not to waste your time.

Thank you for taking the time, and for sharing your edit and for showing and demonstrating all the steps to achieve it.
I have yet to delete it from my hard drive, so towards the end of the week I will give it another try. I will post, only if I manage a half decent edit. I suspect that I will end up deleting it anyway because of the glare on the front paw, and the grass and leaves. Either way this is very helpful to know for future.

Thank you. Truly appreciated.

[ajohnw]

The way I would cope with the glare is to produce an image for a layer that looks something like like this. ASP wouldn't adjust more than -3.5 EV and this is quick and rough.



Then put that under the best result from the other work and brush transparency on where you want the darker tones. I used 3 opacities. 100%, 50% and 25%. The lower 2 for blending in. It's not as difficult as you might think. Just try to do as much as possible with decent sized brushes. This is without any of the finishing off it needs.

Very quick and rough. Some more careful cloning should fix the grass problems if there are any left.



I'm hampered because I tend to get the entire dynamic range of the shot from raw with space at each end of the histogram and keep at least some contrast. ASP's highlight end isn't what I am used to. On the other hand if the colour isn't corrected before applying contrast it will just make things worse.

When using a Nikon camera I sometimes feel it's always worth taking another shot - 1EV even though they supposed to expose correctly these days.

John
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[Brownbear]

John....

Thank you for all of your help. I hope you know that it is truly appreciated. I did manage to figure out how to post process the image to decrease the glare, and eliminate most of the colour cast.

However, these images will just have to be place-makers for me which means that I'm just going to have to find that bear napping in that same spot, with softer light and try again. Cute as the shot is well it's headed you know where.

All the processing just seems to destroy the light, especially on the bears head, and the grass is truly dismal looking. On that day I wasn't able to remove my polarizer from my other lens (stuck on a step up adapter that I ended up taking to a camera shop to remove)

Anyhow... Just to give you a special thank you. Even though I couldn't fix the issues in this image, I learned a lot from trying. And I know this stand me in good stead the next time I capture a similar image with a higher quality, with just a wee colour cast I'm confident that I will be able to handle.

Thank you!

PS I posted my edits to demonstrate that I tried, but at 2nd glance my edits destroyed the beauty of the bear, so I've deleted them.