Monday, February 6, 2023

[Dave]

Lorell, you must either have an excellent long lens or you were very close to the bird to get that fine shot.

Peter, your adjustment made a good photo even better.

Yesterday I also thought of lightening the eye, but I would never have hit on Peter's clever technique. I would have made two adjustment layers: 1) either Brightness and Contrast or Levels to brighten the entire image until the eye looked as good as possible, the fill this layer's Layer Mask with black to hide the adjustment, and then paint on the layer mask with white or a light gray over the eye area to reveal the brightening only where I wanted it; and 2) a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (just in case I thought this would make the eye even better) and increase the saturation by maybe 15% to start. I'd probably then copy the same adjusted layer mask from the first adjustment and apply it to this Hue/Saturation layer. Maybe I'd stay with this layer mask, or maybe I'd tweak it a bit.

I might also lighten the lightest part of the beak a little to see if that makes the image better.

If I get time today (and with your permission, of course) I'll try to find time today to show you at least one version tweaked as described above.