Take off

[seaslug]

White faced heron.

[wigz]

Interesting treatment Greg, effective and artistic looking. I'm still trying to decide whether I like it or not. I think it might work better if you could remove most of the smaller twigs. For me the detail of the twigs isn't quite consistent with the reduced detail in the bird.

[Toddyh]

Definitely interesting. Alan's critique is better than anything I have to offer but I do like to see new things.

[Isac]

I love experimentation Greg and this is really cool. I'd replace all the twigs with a single post or similar as they are very distracting. What was the process?

[seaslug]

Interesting treatment Greg, effective and artistic looking. I'm still trying to decide whether I like it or not. I think it might work better if you could remove most of the smaller twigs. For me the detail of the twigs isn't quite consistent with the reduced detail in the bird.

Definitely interesting. Alan's critique is better than anything I have to offer but I do like to see new things.

I love experimentation Greg and this is really cool. I'd replace all the twigs with a single post or similar as they are very distracting. What was the process?

Thanks all for looking and commenting. This wasn't really an experiment, it was an attempt at rescuing a throw-away shot of the heron taken with the Panasonic on full digital zoom in poor light which I knew would give very poor IQ. I'm afraid I don't have the original any more to show but if I can describe what I had: Virtually no space in front of the bird, the wings and body in shadow, the twigs extending over the bird in several places partly masking some of the body and legs and edges of the bird which were not well defined. I don't necessarily copy what other people do and am quite happy to include a bit of the environment as long as it doesn't block or detract too much from the overall result. I realize that there are other and simpler ways of processing, but this is what I did:

In PS CS3, Added canvas and re-cropped to improve composition.
Filled the added space with sky background.
Did a considerable amount of cloning to remove all twiggy branches from over the bird itself.
Took it to Lightroom for shadows and highlight adjustment.
Back to PS for sharpening and edge cloning to sharpen further just the head area.
Opened in Nik Colour Effex and applied Bleach Bypass to lift detail.
Re-entered Nik CE and applied a little Duplex filtering to take away some of the BB harshness.
Opened in Fotosketcher and applied Painting Filter.
Finished off and resized in PS.

Some or all might consider it not worth it and would have tossed it in the bin, and I nearly did. However I quite like how it turned out and even though it took a bit of time, most of that was spent cloning twigs away from the bird.

Always happy to have a play.. and not necessarily by the book.

[Isac]

Wow Greg, that is some workflow! Well done for having the patience to get the look you were after - well done.