I See You Too!

[Canadian Girl]

While I was heading home from my early morning coffee, I saw them out of the corner of my eye. My little 55-300mm worked over-time to get this close shot. After a lot of cropping and using the unsharp mask tool (which I learned here)! Thanks for the advice. So far my clearest deer shot so far.

[jiro]

You captured them nicely, Cindie. I like the way you composed the shot. A bit bright, but really nice. Good shot!

[jeeperman]

I agree...nice shot.

[Canadian Girl]

Thanks. I thought it was a bit bright too...any CC?

[jiro]

Thanks. I thought it was a bit bright too...any CC?

The background was a bit busy so I'm tempted to say that you darken them a little bit. That's all. I wish we all had those fast telephoto lenses to simply blur the background out to oblivion nicely. LOL! A little extra crop wouldn't hurt probably. Something like this:

[Canadian Girl]

I'm pretty new to Photoshop (I have Elements). Can you explain how you achived this?
Thanks for your time spent,
Cindie

[jiro]

I used Lightroom to do the edit on this one, Cindie. I'm not so sure if PSE have the same sliders but I'll try to explain it in the best way I can.

On the original attached file, I noticed that the highlights (bright areas on the image) are a little bit blown out (meaning they seem to lose detail and texture a little bit). So, what I did is to adjust the RECOVERY tool in lightroom to bring back the detail. It only affects the highlight areas so it's safe. Next, I added some midtone contrast to the image by adjusting the VIBRANCE slider. This gives that rich tones that seems to lack on the furs of the deer and the brown foliage. I lowered down the luminance level of the red color to enrich it further. Same with the orange color but increased the luminance on the yellow. Next, I cleaned up the image by applying noise reduction on the luminance slider and lastly I applied some sharpening to make the image pop. I think that covers it all.

I forgot to add, I cropped the image because I think the extra detail on top is not helping the shot so I cropped it. Thanks.

[Canadian Girl]

Thanks for all the detail....I will give it a try!

[ilovelucydog]

Very nice, Cindie. You didn't say what version of PSE you have? In PSE 7 ( I don't know about 8 or 9) you would have to open your file in Camera RAW to have sliders like Jiro is referring to. If you don't shoot in RAW you can still open the file in RAW you just won't have as much detail to work with. When you go to open your file, go to the drop down and choose 'camera raw' instead of jpeg, or whatever your file is. Hope this helps.